All dogs originate from the social and cooperative gray wolf and the domestication of dogs begun about 15,000 years. By living in close association for this long period of time, dogs have evolved extraordinary human-directed social skills, allowing them to communicate and cooperate with humans. Dogs understand human referential gestures such as pointing, and when presented with a problem they seek human contact. Even though wolves can learn to understand human referential signals such as pointing and gazing, dogs are more skillful. 

It has also been suggested that the problem-solving behaviour of dogs is affected by the dog-human relationship. Dogs that lived as companion dogs were less successful in a problem-solving task compared to dogs who had a working relationship with their owner (e.g. kept as guard dogs). This finding suggests that the type of relationship between the owner and dog influences the dogs when faced with a problem.

The different dog breeds are clustered into different breed groups such as ancient and spitz dogs, toy breeds, working dogs, and herding dogs. Some breeds such as herding and working dogs are selected for human cooperation. Others are selected for hunting independently of human guidance or visually separated from the owner. While some breeds are selected extensively to cooperate with humans, or to work independently, some are considered to be genetically more ancient. Genomics has shown that breeds such as Alaskan malamute, Akita Inu, Chow Chow and Samoyed are separated from the breed groups with modern European origins and clustered genetically closer to wolves. Thus, the suggested ancient breeds are likely to exhibit remnants of wolves’ characteristics, including behavioural traits such as low levels of attachment behaviours compared to other breeds. Using a standardized questionnaire (C-BARQ) it has been shown that ancient dog breeds (which included Basenji, Shiba Inu, Akita, Siberian Husky and Samoyed) show low attachment and attention seeking behaviour towards the owner. However, only few previous studies have investigated the human-directed behaviours in ancient dog breeds.

In addition to the great extent of human-directed social skills that dogs have developed, it has recently been found that dogs may be more affected by their owner than previously thought. Dog-owner dyads have been found to correlate in their long-term stress levels, measured using hair cortisol concentrations. Due to the strong relation between the personality of the owner and cortisol levels, it was suggested that it is the dog who mirrors the owner’s stress and not the other way around. However, this study only included herding dogs which are a group of breeds known for their close cooperation with their owners.

• Compare the human-directed behaviour of ancient and independently working hunting dog breeds, which are bred for other purposes than human cooperation, in an unsolvable problem task. The hypothesis was that the two breed groups would differ in their human-directed social skills where dogs of ancient origins would to a lesser extent express these behaviours compared to independently working hunting breeds. 
• Assess hair cortisol concentrations of both dogs, owners and an extra adult person in the household in order to reflect long-term stress levels.
• Furthermore, the perceived dog-owner relationship, personality of the dog and owner, activity levels as well as the dyads’ current lifestyle situation were investigated, with the hypothesis that these factors might influence behaviour and/or cortisol levels.