This is Scientific American's 60-second Science, I'm Karen Hopkin.Dogs and their people.Who’s a good boy? Are you a good boy? Yes, you are!We like to think our pooches can follow what we’re telling them.Go get your bally! Over there! Go get it! Good doggy!Well, to some degree they can―even when they’re young―because a new study shows that puppies are able to track human social cues at just eight weeks of age, before they’ve really spent much time with people.And their ability to do so has strong roots in their genetics.The work appears in the journal Current Biology.We have known for a long time that adult dogs are especially skilled in understanding cooperative communication from humans.Emily Bray is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Arizona and the Canine Companions for Independence.So, for example, they can spontaneously follow a human pointing gesture.They’re even better at it than apes, which are much more closely related to us than canines are, evolutionarily speaking.So this begs the question of why.Is it a skill that dogs pick up simply by spending time with people?Or is it a trait that was selected for when dogs first became domesticated?To find out, Bray and her colleagues spent time with 375 puppies that were going to be trained to be service dogs by Canine Companions.
