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and Eurasian domestic dogs share a common origin from Old World gray wolves.” In the same issue of Science, Peter Savolainen from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and his colleagues note that the fossil record is problematic “because of the difficulty in discriminating between small wolves and domestic dogs,” but their study of mtDNA sequence variation among 654 domestic dogs from around the world “points to an origin of the domestic dog in East Asia ~ 15,000 yr B.P.” from a single gene pool of wolves. Finally, Brian Hare from Harvard and his colleagues describe the results of their study in which they found that domestic dogs are more skillful than wolves at using human communicative signals indicating the location of hidden food, but that “dogs and wolves do not perform differently in a non-social memory task, ruling out the possibility that dogs outperform wolves in all human-guided tasks.” Therefore, “dogs’ social-communicative skills with humans were acquired during the process of domestication.”24 Although no single fossil proves that dogs came from wolves, the convergence of evidence from archaeological, morphological, genetic, and behavioral “fossils” reveals the ancestor of all dogs to be the East Asian wolf.

The tale of human evolution is revealed in a similar manner (although here we do have an abundance of transitional fossil riches), as it is for all ancestors in the history of life. One of the finest compilations of evolutionary convergence is Richard Dawkins’s magnum opus, The Ancestor’s Tale, 673 pages of convergent science recounted with literary elegance. Dawkins traces innumerable “transitional fossils” (what he calls “concestors”—the “point of rendezvous” of the last common ancestor shared by a set of species) from Homo sapiens back four billion years to the origin of replicating molecules and the emergence of evolution. No one concestor proves that evolution happened, but together they reveal a majestic story of a process over time.25 We know human evolution happened because innumerable bits of data from myriad fields of science conjoin to paint a rich portrait of life’s pilgrimage.

But the convergence of evidence is just the start. The comparative method allows us to infer evolutionary relationships using data from a wide variety of fields. Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza and his colleagues, for example, compared fifty years of data from population genetics, geography, ecology, archaeology, physical anthropology, and linguistics to trace the evolution of the human races. Using both the convergence and comparative methods led them to conclude that “the major stereotypes, all based on skin color, hair color and form, and facial traits, reflect superficial differences that are not confirmed by deeper analysis with more reliable genetic traits.” By comparing surface (physical) traits—the phenotype of individuals—with genetic traits—the genotype—they teased out the relationship between different groups of people. Most interesting, they found that the genetic traits disclosed “recent evolution mostly under the effect of climate and perhaps sexual selection.” For example, they discovered that Australian aborigines are genetically more closely related to southeast Asians than they are to African blacks, which makes sense from the perspective of the evolutionary timeline: The migration pattern of humans out of Africa would have led them first to Asia and then to Australia.26

Dating techniques provide evidence of the timeline of evolution. The dating of fossils, along with the earth, moon, sun, solar system, and universe, are all tests of evolutionary theory, and so far they have passed all the tests. We know that the earth is approximately 4.6 billion years old because of the convergence of evidence from several methods of dating rocks: Uranium Lead, Rubidium Strontium, and Carbon-14. Further, the age of the earth, the age of the moon, the age of the sun, the age of the solar system, and the age of the universe are consistent, maintaining yet another consilience. If, say, the earth was dated at 4.6