Dogs are evolutionarily adapted to coexist with humans, resulting in "sad dog eyes". Are we being manipulated by dumb faces?
There are things that are virtually impossible to resist. Besides food, one of these things is definitely puppies. But it doesn't stop there. We love dogs throughout their lives and they are often a band-aid for the hard disappointments in our lives from people.
Interestingly, humans can't get angry at dogs the way they get angry at their human counterparts. It is probably also because there is never so much perfidy and unpleasant motives in dogs, they are honest and straightforward. Their great advantage is also that they do not talk. How many times do you come home and there is a cataclysm: pillows cut out, food spread out, furniture broken, a small puddle in the corner and in the middle of it all, there's Alík, with a feather on his head and his innocent canine expression: "Please, they came in here, they've ruined everything and although I did my best, I couldn't stop them. But I'm so glad you're here now, and together we'll certainly investigate who did it!"
Dogs have their eyebrows changed so they can communicate with humans
Scientists at the University of Portsmouth have now conducted a study which has found that dogs have evolved over the course of their domestication and cohabitation with humans to better communicate with humans, letting them know how they feel with their eyes and their surroundings. In fact, unlike wolves, they can move their eyebrows very capably. Scientists have found that the facial muscles in wolves and dogs are the same, except for just the change that occurred in dogs.
In fact, dogs nowadays have a small muscle that allows them to raise their inner eyebrows significantly, which is not the case with wolves. The authors of the study suggest that it is this eyebrow-raising motion that elicits caring and encouraging reactions in humans, as it makes the dogs' eyes appear larger and also more like children's eyes or the expressions people have when they are sad. So overall this expression makes people want to care for the dogs, to whine and give them everything in the world.
The bushy eyebrows as an evolutionary advantage
However, the evolutionary goal was surely not to make dogs manipulators who would pull the strings of world events (although for all we know, some people currently believe far sillier conspiracy theories), but simply to be able to communicate better with the people they already exclusively live with when they don't speak the same language.
Some of the looks are kind of irresistible...Research leader Dr. Juliane Kaminski said that when dogs are with people for as little as two minutes, they are more likely to raise that inner eyebrow.
"Our findings suggest that she eyebrow expressiveness in dogs may be the result of unconscious preferences of humans that influenced species selection during domestication," she says. "When dogs make that eyebrow movement, it clearly elicits a strong emotional response and a strong desire to care for them in humans," Juliane Kaminski illustrates. All of this then gave an evolutionary advantage during development to specific dogs that can do bigger dances with their eyebrows, so this trait was only encouraged and passed on.
If this keeps up, dogs will one day be able to help us move furniture with their eyebrows. Unless, of course, we humans sooner destroy this entire planet ecologically, then we may never know what would have happened to that irresistible dog eyebrow, or to other species as well.
