[E]xperiments at Austria’s Wolf Science Center described in Tuesday’s issue of Frontiers in Psychology support the view that wolves had a pre-existing capacity to learn from social partners — and that humans capitalized on that capacity more than 18,000 years ago.

“If you take wolves and socialize them properly at a young age, and work with them on a daily basis, then yes, you can get them to be cooperative and attentive to humans,” said Friederike Range, a researcher at the Messerli Research Institute at the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna.

“There have been several hypotheses regarding domestication, including that there are some social skills dogs have that wolves don’t, or that dogs can accept humans as social partners and wolves can’t,” she said. “The story is not that simple — this we can say for sure.”

Wolves and dogs have been in the news a lot in the last few years as various experiments have worked to figure out the differences and understand the cognitive and social capabilities of canines, especially with regards to humans.

Until now, a lot of the more research purported to show that dogs had the edge over wolves in a number of areas related to human-canine interaction capabilities, but this latest piece of research seems to offer a challenge to that assumption.

Via NBC News.