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chance. Bonobos, on the other hand, are vegetarian, live in societies centered on groups of related females, rarely show aggression, and have never been seen to murder in the wild. Genetically almost identical, the two species are vastly different in behavior.
    Like bonobos and chimpanzees, dogs and grey wolves share most of their DNA—but there seems little reason to presume that, based on this fact, they must inevitably share the same social systems as well. In fact, domestication appears to have dissolved away much of the detail of wolf-specific behavior in dogs, leaving them with a behavioral repertoire that has much in common with that of slightly more distantly related species, such as the coyote Canis latrans , and even some more distant relatives in the same family, such as the golden jackal Canis aureus .
    Even to early biologists, the differences between dogs’ behavior and that of wolves were obvious. Many of these differences are manifested socially: Dogs, for instance, are clearly not pack animals (although they do occasionally form groups), and they are much more adept than wolves at forming relationships with people. Over the years, many eminent biologists, including Nobel Prize winner Konrad Lorenz and even Charles Darwin himself, have been struck by the flexibility of the dog’s behavior as well as by the enormous size difference between the smallest and largest breeds. Both suggested that domestic dogs must be some kind of hybrid between two or even several of the canids. Lorenz, in his charming book Man Meets Dog , was convinced that wolves were far too independent in nature to explain the indiscriminate friendliness shown by many dogs, and proposed that most of the breeds that had originated in Europe were predominantly jackal in origin. He later retracted this idea, having realized that there was no evidence for spontaneous crossbreeding between dogs and jackals (as readily happens between dogs and wolves) and that the details of jackal behavior didn’t fit that of the dogs (the jackal’s howl, for example, is nothing like any dog’s).
    Despite these scientists’ best efforts to determine why dogs are so different from wolves in their behavior, the puzzle was not resolved and remains largely unanswered to this day. Yet perhaps some clues can be gathered if we look further back in evolutionary time, thinking of our domestic dog as a product not of one species, the grey wolf, but of awhole family, the Canidae (also referred to as the Dog family, as noted above, but hereafter referred to as canids to avoid confusion with the domestic dog). Many of the canid species have sophisticated social lives, which—when they overlap with those of dogs—can potentially shed light on the origins of dog behavior; coyotes, for instance, are much more promiscuous than wolves, a characteristic shared with dogs. Although the behavioral traits of other canids are not as well understood or well publicized as those of the grey wolf, they nevertheless have a great deal to tell us about when—and how—dog behavior may have originated.
    Tracing the canids back to their origins reveals that their social intelligence was likely one of the early traits that set dogs’ ancient ancestors apart. Canids probably first evolved some 6 million years ago in North America, where they eventually replaced another type of dog-like mammal, the borophagine. This was a large, hyena-like animal that specialized in scavenging and had massive bone-crushing jaws to match. The original canids, which probably looked more like foxes than dogs, must have been little Davids to the cumbersome borophagine Goliaths, outcompeting them in speed, cunning, and intelligence and ultimately helping to drive them to extinction. If we then fast-forward a mere 1.5 million years, we find that the surviving canids had spread all over the world and split into several types, one of which was the ancestor of today’s dogs,