I'm home today for Rosh Hashana, but I don't consider this work... and anything with the prefix "palaeo-" is immediately fascinating to me. So, I've been reading since my last post.

Wikipedia has a couple of good basic articles: one in their main entry for "Dog", and another separate entry titled "Origin of the domestic dog".

A Google search [canine + domestication] led me to a 2004 doctoral dissertation in anthropology, which I'm still reading through... Here's a link to the pdf. Skip to p. 123: "Chapter IV, The Archaeological Record" for an excellent survey.

Chapter V, Discussion, begins:

Mitochondrial DNA sequences have been used as molecular clocks to determine the earliest domestication of the dog. Vila et al. (1997) suggests that using such clocks indicates that dogs were domesticated over 100,000 years ago. However existing archaeological data contains no evidence of domestic dog before 15,000 years ago, at the outside. The incommensurability of these two data sets is further complicated by animal behaviorists casting doubt on the likelihood that dogs were domesticated from wolves, which suggested that their behavior was too complex.

Raisor, M.J., "Determining the Antiquity of Dog Origins: Canine Domestication as a Model for the Consilience between Molecular Genetics and Archaeology," 2004, Texas A&M U.

... which pretty much seems to be the state of the topic today.

One thing you'll find common to all of the sources is a discussion of neoteny, a.k.a. "paedomorphism", as a common trait of domesticated animals vs their wild counterparts/ancestors. (I first came across the term with regard to human evolution, reading Gould's Ontogeny & Phylogeny a few years ago.) Basically, it's the retention of juvenile characteristics into adulthood (defined as sexual maturity). It's widely postulated as the physical trigger for care-taking instinct in humans for other humans (especially infants), and it appears from what I've read this morning to be a byproduct of breeding other animals for docility. I had it in the back of my head when I mentioned "puppies and children" in my earlier post...

You could call it the "awwww...." factor.

And, in passing -- Someone in Russia did a study breeding wild canids for docility and toleration of human presence, with morphological results directly paralleling variation in domestic dogs: things like coat color and texture, ear and tail configuration, snout and muzzle length, etc.

The subject? Vulpes vulpes, the fox.