Why Anthropologists Should Study Dogs

Abstract

While primates have traditionally been a focus of evolutionary anthropologists, the domestic dog represents a valuable complementary model due to its long shared evolutionary history with humans. The advantages of studying dogs are particularly evident in four key areas: (1) analyzing evolutionary adaptations, (2) understanding humanity's past, (3) examining humanity's cultural diversity, and (4) assessing factors that influence human health. Dogs have convergently evolved social cognition and local adaptations (including altitude adaptations and the ability to digest starches and lactose) that parallel those of humans, making them valuable models for testing evolutionary hypotheses. The global spread of dogs also illuminates human population histories, and isotopic analyses of dog remains can be proxies for human dietary data when sampling human remains is infeasible or inappropriate. Dogs' near-universal presence across human societies and exposure to the same real-world environments further make them uniquely powerful models for studying cultural variation and health.