How did the wolf evolve into man’s best friend?

Would the dog exist if we hadn’t helped create it? That’s one of the thorny questions Mark Derr tackles in his new book, “How the Dog Became the Dog.”  Derr acknowledges that the story of the dog’s emergence (as distinct from its evolutionary forebear, the wolf) cannot be “neatly distilled.” Different estimates place the first appearance of dog-like creatures anywhere from 12,000 to 135,000 years ago. But Derr argues that the dog itself was an “evolutionary inevitability.” He suggests that dogs and humans  — similar animals who “simply took to traveling with each other” tens of thousands of years ago, “and never stopped” — have had a significant influence on each others’ development over the course of a long, co-evolutionary relationship...more