In this lecture, we're gonna discover domestication. We're gonna do that by looking at the Belyaev Foxes, that I told you about in the last lecture, were experimentally domesticated in Siberia. A brilliant experiment that helps us understand what domestication actually is, and also help me and my colleagues test the idea that the unusual abilities that dogs show in using human gestures may be a product of domestication. So for this lecture, chapter four in The Genius of Dogs is all about this project, and about the research on the foxes that I did, and also of course that Dmitry Belyaev, the scientist who actually did the experiment to domesticate the foxes. And I think it'll be really interesting because it tells you the story, Cuz Dmitri Belyaev was really an amazing man. And again, communication, cause we're still talking about this remarkable communicative skills. If you haven't had a chance to play the communication games, you can go to Dognition.com/look, and you can play the communication games for free with you dog. Okay, so I told you Dmitry Belyaev was an amazing man. I really think he was a hero, literally. He fought in World War II and he, in a very difficult time for genetics and biology in Russia post World War II in Stalinist Russia, continued to study Darwinian evolution and genetics. Even though it was extremely dangerous. His brother was actually a geneticist as well but was killed because at the time in Russia geneticists and biologists in general and specifically people who were arguing for Darwinian evolution were in great danger. Because this was something that politically, was seen as not consistent with the dogma of the Russian government at the time. So Dmitry Belyaev was fascinated by how animals became domesticated. He thought that he had an idea about what might cause domestication, but of course he believed in evolution and he was ready to use modern genetics, or the genetic techniques that he had at the time, to study domestication. The challenge was, how could he do that, and not get persecuted, or even killed like his brother? And in figuring out the answer to that he not only survived and had many great students, but he had incredible discoveries about what domestication is and we all benefit. So really, people like Ray Covenger have said it, this is probably the most important behavioral genetics work of the previous century. And I agree. I think this has had huge impact on my own thinking. As you'll see in the first lectures as it applies to human evolution. So the fox in the picture is actually one of the products of the experiment, which I'll tell you about next. But that is actually a fox that, if you ask me the species,the species is it's a red fox. But you can see, it's not a rare red fox, so something has happened to this fox, and this is one of the belyaev foxes. So, having interest in testing the domestication hypothesis and knowing the story of the belyaev foxes, which I'm about to tell you. I traveled to Novosibirsk, it's a city in the middle of Siberia where Belyaev moved his family and his research and founded the Institute for Cytology and Genetics, which is part of the academic of the Russian Academy of Sciences. And he conducted 45 years by the time I arrived, but even today, the experiment continues, and it's been 55 years, and the experiment was very, very simple. He had two populations of foxes, one population he breed randomly, in terms of how they interact with people. But the other population, the experimental line, depicted here, they did a very simple test, which is at seven months, when the pups, kits, fox kits were seven months old, someone as the person in this picture is doing, would try to go and approach and touch the fox. And the foxes, they were born in this experimental line, and if they had the reaction that you see in the fox in the picture at the bottom, then they did not breed that fox. But if they had the reaction of the fox in the picture at the top, which was they approach, they let someone touch them, then they would breed that fox with another fox that had that same friendly interested response to people. And after 45 years, by the time I got there, and now 55 years, they had an incredible population of foxes, and we learned exactly what it is that causes domestication. So my work that I did there was hosted by Irene Plyas Nina, and then I was helped by Natalie Ignatio, and Natalie's holding a fox and Irene's standing next to her. And all the work I'm going to describe would not have been possible without their help. But of course I couldn't help but include a picture of these very cute fox kits. That's a 3-4 month old fox kit that we were working with to see how they use gestures. Now, the reason I went all the way to Siberia to work with Irene Plasnina and Ludmilla Treck, who has continued Dmitry Belyaev's work after he died was because I told you the challenge of testing the domestication hypothesis was how in the world can we find out if dogs have unusual communicative abilities if we can't domesticate a species and intentionally try to get a population to be better at reading gestures. I mean there's really no way to test the hypothesis, so therefore it's not gonna really be available to scientific study, and it's not a very good hypothesis then. But the beauty of the foxes is that we knew as I've described to you exactly how the foxes that Belyaev bred, how they came to be and the selection pressure that resulted in some major changes to the foxes. So let me tell you about the changes that resulted from simply selecting foxes to be friendly, interested in people, and not aggressive. And I think the main thing that is surprising is that even though they only selected on behavior, they ended up having changes in morphology where the foxes that were in the experiment, they were bred to be friendly and interested in people. They had a much higher level or frequency of floppy ears, of star mutation, that's the white spot that you often see on domesticated animals. They had a higher prevalence of curly tails. They had piebald coats, like the fox that I showed you that was white, where there are different colored coats, just like you see on lots of domesticated animals. They also showed a feminized cranium, where, basically, the shape of the skull actually became more feminized, or males had more feminized cranium, in particular. And, they had skeletal gracilization, so basically the bones of their limbs became longer and thinner. And these are, again, things that have been observed in lots of other domesticated species that were not experimentally domesticated.
