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There is no question that the domestication process had a major impact on dogs. There has been a kind of taboo on looking at the other side of this, though: what were the effects on the humanoids, how much did our ancestors change due to the new partnership with dogs? ... any research in this area runs into a taboo about challenging the "god gave man dominion over the animals" of the dominant religious teachings.

Well, perhaps, in the "silly sciences". But among biologists in general, there has been no sign of such a taboo, and this topic is dealt with quite openly. It is well-understood that, as one text I saw recently put it, humans are one of the species with the most symbiotic relationships. We have domesticated several hundred animal species and several thousand plant species. Much of the reason we've been so successful at this is a major human adaptation that is referred to informally as "empathy". We are capable of understanding other species to a much greater degree than they can understand us.

The dog is an interesting case, because it's clear that they differ from their wolf ancestors in that they have a good understanding of human psychology, body language, etc. This is true to a lesser degree in a few other domestic species, notably cats and horses. But most of our domestic animals don't really understand us; we understand them (to varying degrees).

Or course, even with dogs, this takes some learning on our part. I ran across a funny example a few months ago. A writer (whose name I've forgotten) wrote that birds in general are "alien" creatures, with a body language totally unlike ours, and basically incomprehensible to primates like us. My reaction was "What? Is there a problem understanding bird behavior?" But I'd read some of the biological articles on the topic, and (probably more importantly) due to my wife's serious allergies to furry critters, I've lived in a house with birds for several decades. One of them right now is a blue-crowned conure, who was a "rescue" bird. She was found in a tree in a nearby town about 20 years ago, and some people who knew parrots got her to come down for some food. She was nearly starved, and had obviously not been a wild bird. She had a couple of homes for a few years, one of them a friend of ours who had retired, was traveling a lot, and asked if we wanted to give her a home. She has lived with us since.

Now, blue-crowned conures are not in any sense domesticated. It's likely that a very recent ancestor was caught in the wild, and she's the result at most a few generations of breeding (if you can call it that). Her species has no adaptations for living with humans, but she gets along well. And it's obvious that the reason is that we can talk to her in her own language. As the bird books would say, she's now part of a flock that's led by a couple of those funny flightless humans. A year ago, she got outside, and was in a neighbor's tree, totally terrified. We spent an hour "talking" her down to lower and lower branches, until finally she flew to my shoulder and started nibbling my ear. We took her back inside her home, and she shows no interest in that horrible outdoors, except to watch out the window when we're not there, squawking a greeting when we walk up to the house. Just as well; she'd die quickly in the New England winter that's coming, if she didn't starve first. (We also have cockatiels, but they've been domesticated and bred for about 150 years.)

Anyway, this isn't anything at all odd. Around the world, people keep all sorts of "undomesticated" animals as pets. There was a nice example years ago in a National Geographic article that started of talking about an area of India where people express wonder about the Europeans who keep huge "wolves" as pets; aren't they afraid of what those animals will do to their children? The article then went into its topic: In that part of India, people have pet cobras that wander freely around the house. They're not worried about the childre

There is no question that the domestication process had a major impact on dogs. There has been a kind of taboo on looking at the other side of this, though: what were the effects on the humanoids, how much did our ancestors change due to the new partnership with dogs?

Man is more likely to have been affected by its domestication of annual plants like wheat. Growing wheat required settling down into stable communities, tending the plants meticulously, harvesting and storing them as a mass collective effort. Can't remember where I read it, but man has been described as a subservient species to plants like wheat which modified themselves to capture a host organisms. At any rate, I think at least that the adage "You are what you eat" does apply in some small way to the evolution of humans.

"It's not cooking, but it's a similar issue, and it becomes a rather interesting chicken-and-egg question."

Only because we tend to think about evolution on finalistic terms (such as "this allowed us to go towards this goal").

Darwinian evolution is based on fitness and that means a given genotype is selected by means of its expressed phenotype as a whole. There's no "chicken-and-egg" problem since mutations are not queued waiting to see if they win the prize or not prior to go for the next one. At any given moment random mutations can appear; some of them produce a better fitting to current environment; vast majority are either "bad" or neutral. The "proper" combination of brain size/energy cost plus allowed diet plus difficulty or easiness at childbirth plus... is selected on an "all or nothing" way.

So, in the end, it is not that immatureness at birth allowed to bigger brains or the other way around; it is not that a more energetic diet allowed for less costly digestive apparatus which in turn allowed for a more costly brain or the other way around, etc. it all happened more or less at the same time on a monotonic path (while certainly one given mutation did appeared earlier than any other one; I don't think will ever be able to find what exactly happened, mutation by mutation, nor it's needed go down to such level of detail to understand how happened on a more general but still significant way, except, maybe, for a bunch of big steps if they indeed happended).