I just lost the hugest post. Ugh... The point of it was that you actually CAN go back in time, you can look at primitive cultures. Different cultures really represent different stages in the development of humans. They're not just from different places, they represent different eras, different dots on the timeline. My example was papua new guinea, a place I have a close connection to (my girlfriend is from there). In papua new guinea you can actually see an extremely early stage of the dog/human relationship. When you look at it you are actually "looking back in time" to how it all started. No you don't see man crawling into wolf caves to take pups that he intends to raise to do his bidding, no, that's because this is an absurdly outdated fable which all advancements in understanding are exposing to be wrong, a fairy tale that should be abandoned. No instead what you see is dogs weaseling their way into a relationship with reluctant human beings. The humans begrudgingly tolerating them, they're essentially vermine, but they keep the place clean (the staple of their diet is actually human feces), they can be eaten when times are tough, and they also have sharp senses that can be benefitted from when they take it upon themselves to come along on hunts. But they are not cared for at all, not only not "bred", not fed, nothing. They're just a wild beast that found a niche on the fringe of tribal human society, adapting to it and thusly evolving into "dogs" rather than wolves. Man didn't mastermind it at all, if anything the dogs are masterminding it, and man is more like an ox that's given up on slapping the flies off it's butt. From these frosty beginnings, the relationship blossomed, with dogs easily as responsible for the twists and turns it took as man. Really more so. One only needs to look at the directions the relationship did take to know. It wasn't like man had cows, and thought to himself "gee it would be nice if I had something to herd these cows, I'm gonna turn a dog into that thing", no, dogs went up and started herding cows, and then man thought "alright, nice, I have cows now". Dogs were the ones that had the ancestral instinctive knowledge about herding, man had no concept of what herding is, it has nothing to do with the animal he is. Every direction the dog went, was already dictated by the facets that exist in the wild wolf, it's natural array of behaviours and tendencies, the types of dog that emerged are merely each of these behaviours and tendencies under a magnifying glass. Now I know the kind of people even today who are accompanying dogs on these respective journeys down specialised paths, and I say this with the greatest respect and affection but they are not wolf biologists. They weren't in the past either, the further back you go the less and less people understood dogs, and today serious working-dog people still don't understand dogs. To suggest they masterminded the directions of the dog is just really ludicrous, because a deep knowledge of what the wolf had to offer is evident in everything the dog has become, and this is something scholars and scientists grapple with today (as in, in the last 3 or 4 years they're starting to shed a dull light on it sort of), serious "dog men" have no clue about any of it and never have. What has always known, is the natural instincts in the dog. They have been dictating where the dog went, and indeed where the human/dog alliance went. Humans have played their part for sure, but humans didn't domesticate dogs. Dogs domesticated themselves, arguably they domesticated and "tamed" man, and then as a team the dog/human alliance went on together to domesticate other animals, which ultimately allowed for civilisation to come into being, when large quantities of food could be provided for large groups of people, together in limitted space, who no longer had to focus on obtaining food and could instead focus on advancing knowledge and technology and etc. Basically the old view is just extremely insulting to dogs, doesn't give them a fraction of the credit they deserve, and it's way way too complimentary to humans who still to this day haven't exhibited the abilities it attributes them with. It's just a case of understanding the way the human/dog relationship really is, still today, and really was in old primitive cultures. You can see the way it works and it just doesn't mesh with the old theory of dog domestication. It's just not the way it happens.