Why is the dog man's best friend? / The story of a 30,000-year-old relationship

2026-03-24 12:18:00, Blog CNA

Why is the dog man's best friend? / The story of a 30,000-year-old

The dog is perhaps the only species on the planet that has evolved to live alongside humans. For more than 30,000 years, it has been a hunting companion, a watchdog, a helper, and above all, a loyal friend. But why did this strong bond between the two species occur? The answer lies in evolution.

For thousands of years, dogs have lived alongside humans. Today, in many households, they are considered a member of the family. Some dogs even dress up nicely and eat expensive organic food, produced especially for them! We continue to refer to dogs with the old expression “man’s best friend,” because of the positive characteristics associated with them: loyalty, protection, and affection.

Why is the dog man's best friend?

However, long before dogs became our faithful companions, their ancestors roamed in wild packs, hunting prey. Genetic evidence suggests that dogs are descended from the gray wolf and that domestication occurred in at least two stages, in different parts of the world, beginning in Asia over thirty thousand years ago.

How the dog was tamed by the wolf

How did the wolf evolve into a friendly dog? Experts disagree about how this process happened. Without a doubt, humans played a role in this process: men and women have bred (selected) dogs to bring out the desired traits of an ideal companion. Today, there are about 360 recognized dog breeds, many of which are known and loved for their intelligence and gentle temperament.

When did the relationship between humans and dogs begin?

In addition to providing companionship, support, and protection, dogs also provide well-being. Many studies have shown that they improve our psychological and physical health by reducing stress and anxiety. The American Heart Association says that people who own dogs are 65% less likely to die after a heart attack than those who don't, and have a 24% lower risk of mortality from all causes.

Why do dogs understand humans so well?

We study dogs because they're a very interesting model. The reason is that they've been with us for such a long time. Humans domesticated dogs about thirty thousand years ago. And that's a long time, although from an evolutionary perspective maybe not very long, but they're the first species domesticated by us. We think they may have adapted in particular ways to the human environment. So we're very interested in them and we want to find out to what extent they may have adapted to humans in their cognition and psychology.

And domestication happened through a process of mutual adaptation between humans and dogs. They have been selected, consciously or unconsciously, to be very friendly, very cooperative, very nice. Not always, but most of the time. We have selected dogs to be very good at understanding and reading our communication. So we know that dogs understand us, but the question remains to what extent they really understand us or are they just using certain signals, or whether they really fully understand what we are trying to communicate.

How dogs affect our health

We know that dogs are very good at using our verbal cues. We know that we can train them to follow a fairly large number of commands, and most dogs learn them very quickly. So we know that there are dogs that know hundreds and hundreds of objects by name. There was a very famous dog in America, Chaser, who knew over a thousand objects by name.

So we know that dogs are very good at the verbal information they get from us. But we think that their particular strength is reading our nonverbal communication. So dogs seem to be very good at reading our gestures, and they seem to be better than any other species that we've worked with, including our closest relatives, the chimpanzees, at reading our gestural communication.

The social intelligence of dogs

One of the main reasons why dogs have become so attached to humans is their extraordinary social intelligence. Scientific studies show that dogs are among the few species that can accurately interpret human body language, gestures, and emotions.

For example, dogs are very good at following the direction of a human's finger when pointing at something, an ability that even some primates have limited. They can tell whether a person is angry, sad, or happy just from facial expressions and tone of voice.

This ability is no coincidence. Over thousands of years of coexistence with humans, dogs that were better able to cooperate and understand our signals were more likely to survive and reproduce. Over time, this selection process created a species that is particularly sensitive to human communication.

Some researchers even suggest that the human-dog bond also activates bonding hormones, such as oxytocin, the same substance that strengthens the bond between parents and children. This is why interacting with a dog can create a strong sense of trust and closeness.

It is precisely this extraordinary ability to understand and cooperate with people that is one of the main factors that has made the dog, throughout history, man's closest friend./ Bota.al