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Enlarge this image Scientists put several litters of wolf puppies through a standard battery of tests. Many pups, such as this one named Flea, wouldn't fetch a ball. But then something surprising happened. Christina Hansen Wheat Some wolf puppies are unexpectedly willing to play fetch, according to scientists who saw young wolves retrieve a ball thrown by a stranger and bring it back at that person's urging. This behavior wouldn't be surprising in a dog. But wolves are thought to be less responsive to human cues because they haven't gone through thousands of years of domestication. Exactly how dogs emerged from a now-extinct population of ancient wolves is a mystery. Wolves are large, dangerous carnivores, and yet they were the first animals that humans tamed. More than 15,000 years ago, when humans were still hunter gatherers, this large predator somehow began cozying up to people, eventually becoming their "best friend." To try to get clues about how that happened, scientists such as Christina Hansen Wheat of Stockholm University in Sweden have been studying the differences between dogs and modern wolves. As part of her work, she raised litters of wolf puppies, feeding them and acclimating them to her presence but not playing with them or training them. At the age of 8 weeks, the wolf pups were put through a series of standard behavior tests that were administered by a person the wolves had never met. This set of tests is normally used by dog breeders, says Hansen Wheat, to assess how their puppies act in social situations. "The fetching test just happened to be part of this test battery. It wasn't something we were targeting at all," she says. The person conducting the test threw a tennis ball and urged the wolf puppy to bring it back. Two litters of puppies utterly failed to do this, surprising the scientists not at all. "There's some hypotheses out there that the ability to understand human social cues is a unique dog trait, a trait that arose after domestication had been initiated," Hansen Wheat explains, so fetching on command is not a behavior expected in wolves. But then a third litter went through the tests. And as she watched through a window, one of the wolf puppies went for the ball and returned it to the tester, according to a report in the journal iScience. "When I saw the first puppy fetch — I still get goosebumps when I talk about this — it was such a surprise," Hansen Wheat says. "It wasn't just one puppy, it was actually three of them. That was very exciting." Credit: Christina Hansen Wheat Because three of the 13 tested wolf puppies spontaneously did this, a willingness to fetch might not be a dog trait, she says. Instead, it might be a wolf trait that existed in the ancestral wolf populations. "It might have been something that we have tried to select upon during early do
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