Toss a ball across the room, and most domesticated dogs will naturally fetch it.
Turns out wolf pups* will, too.
Researchers were shocked to find that the ability to interpret human cues that enable a dog to pick up and return a ball also exists in wolves.
As described in a paper published this week in the journal iScience, a pair of Stockholm University scientists tested 13 wolf cubs from three different litters to assess various behaviors.
During the experiment, three eight-week-old wolves spontaneously showed interest in a ball, and returned it to a stranger—with some encouragement.
“When I saw the first wolf puppy retrieving the ball I literally got goosebumps,” study co-author Christina Hansen Wheat said in a statement.
The discovery comes as a surprise, considering popular belief suggests the cognitive abilities necessary to understand human cues arose in dogs only after they were domesticated, some 15,000 years ago.
“It was so unexpected,” Hansen Wheat said. “I immediately knew that this meant that if variation in human-directed play behavior exists in wolves, this behavior could have been a potential target for early selective pressures exerted during dog domestication.”
To study how subjugation affects behavior, the team raise wolves and dogs from the age of 10 days, putting them through a battery of tests.
Among them: a person the animal does not know throws a tennis ball across the room and, without any prior experience or training, encourages it to return the object.
Researchers never really expected wolf pups to catch on; after the first two litters showed little to no interest in balls, let alone retrieving one, they assumed the experiment was a bust.
Until they tested the third brood.
Indeed, some of the pooches not only played with the ball, but also responded to social cues from an unfamiliar person and brought it back.
“It was very surprising that we had wolves actually retrieving the ball,” Hansen Wheat said. “I did not expect that. I do not think any of us did. It was especially surprising that the wolves retrieved the ball for a person they had never met before.”
In retrospect, though, it also makes sense.
“Wolf puppies showing human-directed behavior could have had a selective advantage in early stages of dog domestication,” she added.
Moving forward, the team will continue their work to learn more about the behavioral differences and similarities between hand-raised dogs and wolves.
* Geek does not advocate the breeding of wolves as pets
More on Geek.com:
- Watch: California’s Only Known Wolf Pack Has Three New Pups
- Remains of 40,000-Year-Old Ice Age Wolf Found in Siberia
- Four Critically Endangered Red Wolf Pups Born at Chicago Zoo
- ‘Dog’ Rescued From Frozen River Turns Out to Be a Wild Wolf
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