1
00:00:02,040 --> 00:00:06,880
Speaker 1: Welcome to brain stuff from how stuff works. Hey, brain

2
00:00:06,960 --> 00:00:10,600
Speaker 1: stuff is Christian Sager. My dogs Winchester and see blue.

3
00:00:10,800 --> 00:00:14,280
Speaker 1: They are real smart. So I was intrigued when I

4
00:00:14,280 --> 00:00:17,439
Speaker 1: read a new study that said wolves are more intelligent

5
00:00:17,520 --> 00:00:21,279
Speaker 1: in some ways than my dogs and all their canine friends,

6
00:00:21,680 --> 00:00:25,280
Speaker 1: whether you have a chocolate lab or a coonhound. Scientists

7
00:00:25,280 --> 00:00:29,040
Speaker 1: believe that some modern dogs and wolves descended from a

8
00:00:29,160 --> 00:00:34,000
Speaker 1: common ancestor between eleven thousand and thirty thousand years ago.

9
00:00:34,560 --> 00:00:38,839
Speaker 1: The new study, which was published in the September Journal

10
00:00:38,840 --> 00:00:42,920
Speaker 1: of Scientific Reports, is by an international team of researchers

11
00:00:43,000 --> 00:00:47,720
Speaker 1: at the Wolf Science Center in Vienna, Austria. They found

12
00:00:47,760 --> 00:00:54,840
Speaker 1: domesticated dogs cannot make the connection between cause and effect wolves, however, can.

13
00:00:55,400 --> 00:00:59,400
Speaker 1: They came to that conclusion by testing and comparing how

14
00:00:59,440 --> 00:01:03,240
Speaker 1: the two she's searched for food after giving them hints

15
00:01:03,280 --> 00:01:07,040
Speaker 1: about where it was located. Researchers used fourteen dogs and

16
00:01:07,080 --> 00:01:11,520
Speaker 1: twelve socialized wolves in their experiments. During the tests, the

17
00:01:11,560 --> 00:01:15,000
Speaker 1: animals had to choose between two containers, one with food

18
00:01:15,080 --> 00:01:18,880
Speaker 1: and one without. The first thing researchers did was determined

19
00:01:18,920 --> 00:01:22,800
Speaker 1: whether the animals could make sense of communicative clues by

20
00:01:22,880 --> 00:01:27,000
Speaker 1: pointing and looking at the container with the food. Researchers

21
00:01:27,120 --> 00:01:30,160
Speaker 1: next wanted to see how the dogs and wolves responded

22
00:01:30,360 --> 00:01:34,280
Speaker 1: to behavioral cues. The experiment or pointed to the container

23
00:01:34,319 --> 00:01:39,280
Speaker 1: with food, but did not make eye contact with the animals. Finally,

24
00:01:39,560 --> 00:01:43,320
Speaker 1: in the last experiment, the animals had to infer themselves

25
00:01:43,640 --> 00:01:49,200
Speaker 1: which container had the hidden food, using only causal clues

26
00:01:49,280 --> 00:01:53,000
Speaker 1: like noises made when the experiment or shook the container

27
00:01:53,320 --> 00:01:57,000
Speaker 1: with the food. Both the wolves and the dogs did

28
00:01:57,040 --> 00:02:01,919
Speaker 1: well on the communicative clue tests all found the hidden food.

29
00:02:02,240 --> 00:02:07,680
Speaker 1: Both species, however, failed the behavioral cue portion. Without direct

30
00:02:07,720 --> 00:02:12,160
Speaker 1: eye contact, neither a dog nor wolf could find the food.

31
00:02:12,760 --> 00:02:15,480
Speaker 1: During the last part of the test, however, only the

32
00:02:15,520 --> 00:02:19,280
Speaker 1: wolves could make casual inferences as to where the food

33
00:02:19,360 --> 00:02:23,120
Speaker 1: was located. In other words, the scientists said the wolves,

34
00:02:23,360 --> 00:02:29,600
Speaker 1: not the pooches, understood cause and effect. Study author Michelle

35
00:02:29,720 --> 00:02:34,200
Speaker 1: lamp from the Netherlands reminded us, however, that the differences

36
00:02:34,280 --> 00:02:37,480
Speaker 1: can be explained by the fact that wolves are more

37
00:02:37,520 --> 00:02:42,200
Speaker 1: persistent to explore objects than dogs. That's because dogs are

38
00:02:42,240 --> 00:02:46,000
Speaker 1: conditioned to receive food from us, whereas wolves have to

39
00:02:46,040 --> 00:02:50,400
Speaker 1: find food themselves in nature. What shocked researchers was that

40
00:02:50,440 --> 00:02:54,880
Speaker 1: the wolves were able to interpret direct eye to eye contact.

41
00:02:55,280 --> 00:02:59,840
Speaker 1: That understanding of communicative cues, researchers said may have for

42
00:03:00,000 --> 00:03:04,680
Speaker 1: facilitated domestication. The study is unique also in that it

43
00:03:04,880 --> 00:03:09,280
Speaker 1: used dogs that lived in both packs and with families,

44
00:03:09,320 --> 00:03:13,920
Speaker 1: but the results of the dogs were independent of living conditions.

45
00:03:45,040 --> 00:03:49,880
Speaker 1: Today's episode was written by John Paritano, produced by Tristan McNeil,

46
00:03:50,200 --> 00:03:53,280
Speaker 1: and For more on this and other topics, please visit

47
00:03:53,360 --> 00:04:05,320
Speaker 1: us at how stuff works dot com.