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Worlds First Dog 31700 Years

January 25, 2012 by · Comments Off on Worlds First Dog 31700 Years 

Worlds First Dog 31700 Years, Ask Mark Derr about his recently deceased dog Katie, and he’ll speak of her “two-brain” intelligence, a set of smarts that encompassed both athletic skill and mental acuity. He’ll tell you that she didn’t really care about food so long as she had her tennis ball – her favourite toy. But perhaps the most compelling thing Derr will say about his beloved kelpie, who passed away Sept. 13 at the age of 13½, is that he felt a mutual connection to the animal, a bond that seemed to transcend all time and space, all emotion and logic.

“People say it’s love, but I think it’s a very deep empathetic understanding that these two species have,” he says, referring to man and his best friend. “That’s partly why I say the dog was an evolutionary inevitability. It sounds predeterministic, doesn’t it? But some things are inevitable.”

The dog was bound to happen from the day man and wolf first crossed paths, writes the Florida-based author of the new book How the Dog Became the Dog: From Wolves to Our Best Friends, published in November 2011. If the two hadn’t joined up and hunted together, there wouldn’t be an estimated one billion dogs in the world, he contends. There would be no playful Labs or golden retrievers, no “infantilized” breeds such as pugs or French bulldogs with wrinkly, short-muzzled faces that make it hard for them to breathe. (He goes so far as to call the pug a “monument to some of the worst practices of modern breeding.”)

“They want to make these dogs look like dolls,” Derr says from his Miami Beach home. “And the long hair! In some cases, studies have shown this affects the ability of animals to communicate … They can’t see and other animals can’t see them.

“And some dogs can’t even make the full range of dog vocalizations any more,” he adds, sounding somewhat exasperated by the many ways humans have manipulated the mutt.

While Derr spends much of the historically rich book exploring the evolution of the dog and man’s relationship with it, he has a lot to say about modern-day breeding practices that have turned the once codependent companionship between man and dog into the hyper-controlled parent-child type arrangement of many pet owners today.

Over the past 200 years, people have turned away from “the mutualism on which the human-dog relationship was built,” he says, and in-stead have veered toward “total human dominance and control over the animal’s freedom of movement, reproduction and ultimately its death. Part of it is the way you conceive of the animal, I think, and that is: Is it a pet? Is it something you can just do with as you will? Or is it a companion?”

Legally, humans serve as owners, but they’re really the dog’s companions and guardians, he says. “We have certain responsibilities to them and we should treat them with re-spect the same way we should treat all animals with respect.”

Respect was inherent in the early days of the dog when humans and wolves hunted together, Derr argues in the book, which takes readers from the last ice age through the 20th century.

“Once these two species met, because of great similarities – they’re both social beings, both living in the same family settings, as in Ma and Pa are the alphas – it became inevitable that the dog would emerge.”

Evidence suggests that the original dogs were camp guards, hunters and companions, taking on the nomadic lifestyle of humans. They were smaller than wolves and had shorter noses, which researchers believe signifies domestication.

Many of those same researchers have long quibbled over when and where the first dog showed its snout.

The estimations range from 35,000 to 135,000 years ago, with genetic proof pointing to many parts of Asia and the Middle East. Dogs have also been found around the same time periods in Europe. In 2008, Belgian paleoarcheologists said they discovered a dog skull that had been found in the country’s Goyet Caves a century earlier, but had never been studied. At 31,700 years old, the skull signified the oldest dog on record, about 15,000 years older than the runner-up from Paleolithic hunters in Russia.

What is clear from the research is that these dogs were on the move with humans and they helped each other out, Derr says. A human would watch a wolf corner and kill its prey, then he’d snatch the meat from the animal’s grasp.

Dog Skull 33000 Years

January 25, 2012 by · Comments Off on Dog Skull 33000 Years 

Dog Skull 33000 YearsDog Skull 33000 Years, Dogs have been “man’s best friend” longer than any other animal. And, as it turns out, longer than previously thought. A pair of research papers published in the past few years, one most recently by a team that includes the University of Arizona, significantly pushes back the timeline for domestication of dogs from about 14,000 years ago to more than 30,000 years ago.

Researchers at UA and universities in England and the Netherlands used radiocarbon dating to determine that the skull of a Siberian dog was about 33,000 years old. Slightly older dog remains were identified in Belgium a few years ago by a separate research team.

The two findings indicate the process of domestication was occurring in separate regions at a time when early humans, including Neanderthals, in Europe and Siberia were small-group hunter-gatherers. About 14,000 years ago, Neanderthals were gone and humans were more mobile, living and hunting in larger groups.

The latest study’s co-author, UA professor Gregory Hodgins, said the finding broadens the timeline of humans interacting with the natural world. While humans have depended on animals since the dawn of the human species, domestication of animals indicates a symbiotic relationship between the two.

“It suggests living in close quarters and some sort of emotional bond,” he said.

Scientists believe dogs are the oldest domesticated animal and descended from wolves.

To determine whether dogs were domesticated, researchers look for physical traits, such as shorter snouts, wider jaws and crowded teeth. Scientists theorize that humans perhaps showed a preference for wolves that were more social and looked less threatening. Over time, those behavioral and physical traits became more prevalent.

Before the most recent discoveries in Siberia and Belgium, the first signs of dog domestication appeared about 14,000 years ago. At some point, humans began relying on dogs for things like protection, hunting and companionship.

Dogs allowed humans to become a different, more effective predator, said Michael Barton, an Arizona State University anthropology professor who was not a co-author of either recent study. A dog’s keen sense of smell allowed humans to track animals better.

“They give us an edge,” he said.

Researchers don’t believe the Siberian or Belgian dogs are direct ancestors to today’s modern dogs. It’s likely these early lineages didn’t survive a period when the Earth’s ice sheets were at their thickest about 20,000 years ago.

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