And even with a lot of repetition, 36 trials is a lot of repetition,
they were not showing improvement and that suggested to us that
really there was something different between the two species.
Now we did do one other control because you could say,
well the wolves, maybe they're just not good at any of these kinds of games.
They're wolves.
They want to run around and do wolf things, not play your human games.
We did play other games, for instance we played a memory game.
And in that memory game, where all they had to do was remember where food was and
Christina would hide it in one of her two hands.
And then they had to remember which hand it was in.
That was easy for them and they actually did as well as the dogs in that game.
So it's not that they couldn't play games with Christina,
they were required memory and cognition, a type of cognition,
it really seemed that it was specific to this social gesture where they struggled.
So, that then led us to say, well it's not, we couldn't find any evidence for
the exposure hypothesis.
We didn't find any evidence on the first attempt to look at this,
so this ancestry hypothesis.
That made us then think about the domestication hypothesis.
What if Sid's dogs split from wolves?
There's been some kind of evolution, that dogs have actually changed, and they have
evolved to read human social gestures in a way that other species can't.
Oh my goodness, that would be really exciting if that was the case, and
we got really interested in thinking about the idea.
And of course, the reason that would be exciting is because these are the same
skills that we are interested in trying to understand how they evolved in humans.
Given that we haven't seen the great apes use gestures the way that we do, but
dogs seem more similar to us.
So, if we could see how this happened in dogs, and
if it really was the case that dogs had evolved these skills during domestication,
we'd understand ourselves better.
But, at the same time, anytime there's a hypothesis that seems that exciting,
you have to be extra careful.