You know, if you spend enough time reading about anything in science, if your topic is narrow enough, you begin to learn the big names in the field. If youâre reading about PTSD treatments, youâve probably come across Edna B. Foa. If youâre reading about canid play behavior, youâve probably come across my new buddy Byosiere/Bowser. But if you are even remotely adjacent to dog evolution, you cannot go anywhere without running into Robert K. Wayne from UCLA. RK Wayne is everywhere. I was reading dog papers every day this time last year, and a good 80% max of the citations were Robert K. Wayne and friends. And thatâs just of the authors I could see. If a paper has worked on dog evolution, RK Wayne has most likely had something to do with it. I found him on a paper once where the authors were basically âRussian woman, Russian man, Russian woman, RK Wayne, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian.â The research was literally done thanks to an archaeological dig in Soviet Russia. And RK Wayne was just... there. The only papers I have not seen him on were exclusively Asian papers, which you get a lot of but not in the field of dogs, usually.Â
My favorite story about RK Wayne that I like to tell people is in regards to the argument about where dogs were domesticated. Yes, this is a point of huge contention, along with the date of domestication, and the paper I tend to support says there were two independent domestication events, one in Europe, one in Asia, and the Asian dog later displaced the European dog. Anyway. The Asian paper I was talking about above was one of many that had looked at the genetics and placed the domestication of the dog in China. The paper I used specifically cited the Yellow River. Meanwhile, hordes of other papers also looked at the genetics and said that dogs were domesticated somewhere in Europe. And the way I tell the story is that while those two groups are yelling at each other, RK Wayne is standing off way off in the distance shouting at the top of his lungs âTHE MIDDLE EAST!â and writing papers that claim dogs were domesticated in the Middle East. Compared to the amount of people publishing studies claiming Europe and Asia as a site of domestication, itâs just RK Wayne and a few (relatively consistent) friends pushing for a Middle Eastern domestication. Not saying they donât have the evidence - they all do - but the small number is absolutely hilarious to me.
