Dev.SN

testing writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket [soylentnews.org] has found the following story [soylentnews.org] :

Living near humans may have tamed wild mice, a new study finds. 

By Roni Dengler [soylentnews.org]Mar. 6, 2018 , 7:01 PM

From the floppy ears of dogs to the curly tails of pigs, domesticated animals sport a different look than their wild cousins—a look that scientists chalked up to human intervention. Now, a new study of wild mice shows that they, too, can develop signs of domestication—white fur patches and short snouts—with hardly any human influence. The work suggests that the mice are able to tame themselves, and that other animals like dogs may have done the same before they were fully domesticated by humans.

Much of what we know about how animals change appearance during domestication comes from a famous experiment in Siberia in the 1950s. Researchers found that when they took wild foxes and let only the tamest breed, the foxes began to develop doglike features such as curly tails, smaller heads, and floppy ears. Nearly 100 years earlier, Charles Darwin dubbed this suite of traits domestication syndrome. But could these traits arise without any human intervention? An experimental accident suggests they can.

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