Brain size reduction in dogs was already established at least by the Late Neolithic of Western Europe, 5000 years ago
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The timing and causes of brain size reduction in domestic dogs remain uncertain. Using endocast’s volume as a proxy for brain size, this study provides a first insight into long-term brain size evolution in the wolf-dog lineage. We compared endocranial volumes of 185 modern and 22 prehistoric wolves and dogs ranging from Western Europe to Australia, and spanning the Pleniglacial (35 Ky BP) to the Late Neolithic (5 Ky BP). Our results reveal that Pleistocene so called “protodogs” show no brain size reduction compared to coeval Pleistocene wolves. Instead, we observed a slightly larger relative endocranial volume in the 35,000-year-old ‘protodog’ from Goyet, which could suggest increased behavioural flexibility in the presence of humans. This hypothesis needs to be tested further. In contrast, Late Neolithic dogs show a drastic 46% brain size reduction with an endocranial volumes comparable to modern small terrier and toy breeds. The anxious and wary temperaments of these Late Neolithic dogs, induced by the brain tissue reorganization associated with such a size reduction, could have served an alerting purpose, among the many other potential roles dogs could have played within this Late Neolithic socio-ecosystems.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".