Question

Passage A

For decades, the prevailing archaeological consensus held that the domestic dog arose from a deliberate partnership initiated by prehistoric humans. According to this view, Upper Paleolithic hunter-gatherers actively captured wolf pups, integrating them into human camps. Over generations, humans selectively bred these wolves for desirable traits such as docility, loyalty, and hunting prowess. This active selection model positions humans as the primary agents of evolutionary change, suggesting that early humans recognized the utility of wolves as sentinels and hunting partners and consciously shaped the species to fulfill these roles. In this narrative, dog domestication was a top-down, intentional technological innovation of early human societies.

Passage B

An alternative hypothesis suggests that the domestication of dogs was not an intentional human invention, but rather an evolutionary process driven by self-domestication. Proponents of this model argue that as human populations began to establish semi-permanent settlements, they generated piles of food waste on their peripheries. A subpopulation of wolves with lower flight-initiation distances—essentially, those that were naturally less fearful of humans—began to scavenge these dumps. Over time, these bolder wolves gained a distinct survival advantage over their more timid, forest-dwelling counterparts. Natural selection, rather than human breeding, favored those wolves best adapted to the human niche, leading to physiological and behavioral changes that ultimately resulted in the domestic dog.

Based on the two passages, the authors of Passage A and Passage B disagree most fundamentally on which of the following questions?