An interesting note concerning dogs: Russian researchers had discovered a while back that all that was required for domestication is a single gene. This gene exists in foxes, wolves and dogs. The allele required to cause domesticity is a DOMINANT marker. This means that all that is required for a dog, fox or wolf to go domestic and treat humans as friendlies, is for a single copy of the dominant allele to be present. If both copies of the gene have this dominant allele (dogs are like this) then the animal is true-breeding and all progeny from this animal mated with another that also has both genes in this configuration, will be domestic. It turns out, in light of this evidence, that the domestication of dogs likely did not take thousands of years as had been previously thought. Ancestors of dogs were likely already primed for this event and all it took was some enterprising humans to realize the potential of having pets.
