Imagine a human sitting by the proverbial campfire about 15,000 years ago with a few young puppies. This would have been early in the dog domestication saga, so the human may have been considering what the pups were good for. Food? Fur? Noble companion?

So let’s suppose the human tossed a stick. Several puppies ignored it, but one waddled off at a puppy trot to chase it, and at the human’s urging, brought it right back. Hmm, the human thought, no stew pot for you.

This is a purely imaginary scene. Scientists have not discovered a new cave painting of the very first game of fetch. But Christina Hansen Wheat and Hans Temrin, biologists at Stockholm University, have found something almost as intriguing. They observed eight-week-old wolf puppies retrieve a thrown ball at the urging of a stranger, without any training.

Only three of 13 pups, over several years of testing, played fetch. And they were far from perfect. So it’s not as if this is a hidden talent of all wolves. But the researchers say that if the ability to engage with people this way is present in some wolves, it seems likely that it was present in the ancient wolves, now extinct, that were the ancestors of dogs, rather than evolving from new mutations during domestication.