Why was it easier for humans to tame wolves (and it’s still relatively easier to co-exist close to them compared to lions)?
In: Biology
Hmm this is a very big and nuanced question – but it all comes down to the way that the family groups work, and the time period we’ve got to work with.
Wolves and Lions are very different animals – both in size, dynamics, and who they do and do not consider prey. Thousands of years ago, a pack of wolves would not have considered a mid-large group of humans prey. They dare not come into our camps to try and pick us off one by one without great risk to their own health. Single humans are a different story, but definitely not groups. What they did notice however, is that we left around a lot of prey and remains.
Over time, this reliance on us led to comfortability between both species. This is similar to say, coyotes in the modern day. Many many years ago, seeing a coyote in a human settlement would be something to freak out about, but now they come by more often and go after our scraps and food. They’re learning not to fear us, and we’re learning not to fear them. They’re also not really in a position to hurt us when we’re in our homes (like wolves were back then).
Eventually, this led to evolutionary success – wolves that didn’t fear people got more food from people, and thus had more children who too did not fear people. **Humans also realized the usefulness of wolves** – *and this made them drastically different from a lion pack*.
Wolves, Horses, Cows – these big animals that we’ve domesticated share a common social structure known as “pack hierarchy”; which made them drastically easy to control and domesticate in the field. Wolf families do not infight (typically speaking) and have a level of respect for the leader. Humans were able to exploit this (just like the other animals I mentioned), by becoming the leader. Your dog looks up to you because you are its parent, its group leader. If the wolf pack leader looks up to you, you are now **the wolf pack leader and you tell them what to do**. This made the domestication part easy.
Sometimes a species will be close to humans, but not have this family structure we can utilize to buff their domestication stat. You can imagine a squirrel for this example – they’re not family pack animals and thus even though they effectively did what wolves do in the scavenging department; they’re not really easily domesticatable.
**Now let’s get into lions**.
Lions and humans have *ALWAYS* had issues. Remember how I mentioned that wolf packs do not consider a mid – large size group of humans prey animals? **Lions do**. A lion pride has no problem going up against a group of humans and picking off a few of us for the taking. Historically, we’ve got tons of references and mentions of this rivalry going back centuries. We were always prey animals to these creatures (until very recently).
Lion cohabitation with humans is simply too risky of an endeavor for us to have ever gotten behind. A wolf can come close to camp and be somewhat friendly – but a lion? Even today, you are not comfortable around such a big cat (regardless of what the owner says).
Lion prides are also not the typical pack hierarchy. Lions do not respect elder pack leaders, and this is not how they operate. A lion pride is a constant show of force; males will exhibit controlling behavior and do not have a hierarchy amongst themselves. When a male lion grows old, a younger male will enter the pride – either kill or fight him off – and take his mates/pride.
You simply could not control the “pack leader” like you can with wolves. The pride head does not take kindly to subordinate behavior and is instinctively pushed to either fight you for dominance or leave. A wolf pup that you raise will always look to you as a parent and stay with you for life – even if it gains its own pack. A male lion cub is instinctively driven to leave you once it reaches maturity, or fight you for control. It just doesn’t happen.
In Africa today, lions do exist in a sort of co-habitance with humans, but this isn’t because they see benefit in us. They’ve learned to avoid us because of the advent of guns. We can kill them quite easily. However, this relationship is and always will be on edge because a lion will always be able to consider you prey.
They share absolutely nothing. Wolves do not gather in large packs of unrelated or semi-related individuals with an alpha leader. That is a myth that came from a researcher studying wolves in captivity, where unrelated adults were forced to live together in a small space – a wholly unnatural way for them to live. The author of that book retracted it *decades* ago and no animal researcher or behaviorist takes the theory seriously.
Instead, wolves live in family units. Mom and dad are the “alphas” for the same reason that your parents are the “alphas” when you’re growing up – they are the ones taking care of the pups. They have knowledge and skills and are big and strong. That doesn’t mean they’re strong enough to fight off a pup trying to claim its place as alpha, it means they’re strong enough to fight off anything else trying to kill the pups, and strong enough to get food for the family.
Once the pups are old enough to fend for themselves, they just…wander off to go start their own family units. They *may* eventually challenge each other for control over the territory, but it isn’t like the stronger wolf subjugates the weaker wolf. The wolf that loses just leaves to find a new territory.
Lions *do* live in larger colonies of semi-related individuals with a ruling alpha male. However, it’s not *always* only one male. Sometimes siblings stay together and “rule” the pride together. There are also plenty of roaming, single males that don’t keep a pride, they just wander around, find some females hanging out, mate, and fuck off again. Males *do* fight for control over the pride, and the winner will often kill all the cubs to ensure that the next generation is his alone. When males get old enough, they challenge or leave.
Note, though, that the females in the pride are not merely subjects of the alpha. Females often drive off a male if they don’t like him for whatever reason. Typically, it’s the females that do all the hunting while the male lays about, but if he gets *too* lazy, they might kick him out of the pride. Or they don’t like his smell, or he’s being a dick to the females…whatever the reason, they will group up and fight him together, driving him out of the pride. Then, either the oldest cub will grow into the role of the alpha or some single male will wander in and take over.
Humans tamed wolves because an adult male wolf *might* weigh as much as your average fit human male, and an adult female wolf weighs 20-60 pounds less than that. An adult lion might weigh more than double your average *big dude* and at *minimum* weighs more than your average football linebacker. Consider that wolves evolved to prey mostly on deer – which aren’t *small* by any stretch, but they’re a far cry from the water buffalo, giraffes, and the occasional elephant or hippo that lions eat. Wolves are just a hell of a lot easier to handle. Moreover, humans are big enough and strong enough that your average wolf won’t try to eat us. Predators don’t like a fight, because even a relatively minor injury in the wild can mean death. They want easy prey.
In the wild, predators often coexist with each other, even coexisting with large prey animals if they all know that there’s no point in fighting. A wolf might be comfortable coming closer to an ancient human because we know the wolf isn’t *really* going to come after us unless it’s desperate, and the wolf knows the same. A lion, on the other hand, can make quick work of a human, so we keep our distance and attack them before they get the chance to attack us. Wolves essentially domesticated themselves this way, coming close to human camps to pick up scraps.
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