According to leading theories, dogs evolved from a group of gray wolves at least 15,000 years ago. So does this mean that modern dogs are smarter than their canine ancestors? According to experts, the answer is no. But this does not mean that wolves are smarter than dogs.

“You never say dog ​​or wolf [розумніші]because we always said they both adapted to their environment,” assistant scientist Juliana Brauer of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Germany told LiveScience. said.

Animal cognition is measured by a set of skills that are generally divided into two categories: social cognition, or the skills a person has regarding other animals, and nonsocial cognition, or how animals process and manipulate the physical world around them. According to Breuer, wolves and dogs have different cognitive skills appropriate to their lifestyles.

“You have to look at these cognitive skills individually,” he said. “I always compare [з] subjects in school”.

One of the most common experiments used to measure cognitive ability in dogs and wolves is the pointing test. In a 2021 study, researchers placed two glasses upside down on a table, with food hidden under one. They then instructed 44 pups to find food by giving them cues, such as pointing at a cup, looking at it, or placing a block next to it. After repeating the exercise with 28 wolf pups, the team found that the dogs were twice as likely to find food as their cousins.

“There seems to be something more innate in dogs’ cognitive abilities that allows them to understand these types of pointing tasks and understand the intent behind human movements,” says co-author Hannah Salomons, a postdoctoral evolutionary anthropologist at Duke University. She said the study is life science.

INSIDE 2017 survey Another group of researchers, including Brauer, conducted an experiment in which they shook a glass containing food. Both dogs and wolves equated the cup with food. But when the researchers shook the empty glass, the wolves stayed where they were and the dogs struggled to do so. This shows that wolves understand cause and effect better than dogs, Brower said.

“Wolves have adapted to their environment [і] “They are responsible for their food; they don’t just get it from humans. So it’s a very adaptive thing for them to understand something about the causal relationships that they show in this study.”

These are just a few of the many tests done to measure cognitive abilities in wolves and dogs, according to Friederike Range, animal researcher and founder of the Wolf Science Center in Vienna. At this center, researchers frequently test the social and physical skills of dogs and wolves. They found that, in general, wolves were more adept at working with each other, while dogs were generally better at tasks with humans because “domestication introduced a very different picture for dogs,” Range told LiveScience. “They’re not so dependent on working with each other anymore.”

In any case, experts say these tests are not used to determine whether dogs are smarter than wolves, but to better understand how they navigate the world.

“I don’t think there’s any point in trying to rank intelligence, because it’s hard to measure even in humans,” Salomons said. “It would be hard for us to say, ‘Oh, who was smarter, Van Gogh or Einstein,’ right?” These people had completely different skills. “The same goes for animals.”