*Yes, I read and have loved the entire Clan of the Cave Bear series, so the thought that doggies – or wolves – have been accompanying humans throughout a longer time span than previously thought makes perfect sense. I do not like living without a dog. This is not just because I love ’em, but also because I know living beside a fur baby makes me a better human, mirrors, reveals, and reports on my moods, gets me out of bed on even my worst days (which I hardly ever have anymore) and gets me outside where I remember how much I love being out and about in the beautiful, wonderful, complicated world. Except nature – the woods, the views, the river, the rain whether driving or soft – all of these ground me; all of these simplify the knotted present moment, make life settle in and down once more, prompt and nudge me (as do my fur babies) as to what actually matters, as well as reminding me just how big the world is, how small I am, and how putting one foot in front of the other is enough.
From National Geographic: While scientists have known that dogs were our first domestication relationship, before even agriculture took root, exactly how far back our best friendship goes just got pushed back another few thousand years.
Two new papers, published March 25 in the journal Nature, have compared genetics from canines found in ancient human sites across Europe, and shown that dogs were genetically distinct from wolves—and buddy-buddy with people—more than 14,000 years ago. Even before farming, dogs were a common part of life across many ancient cultures, potentially aiding in guard duty, hunting and as a part of rituals.
“Once you have dogs, these dogs are attached to human populations through time,” says Lachie Scarsbrook, a paleogeneticist at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in Germany. “We call it the Swiss Army Dog. They can adapt to all these cultural roles we associate with dogs today.”
Archaeologists have uncovered canines buried alongside humans dated to 34,000 years ago. But simply something dog-like buried next to a human does not a dog make, Scarsbrook explains. “The burying of an animal alongside humans is a risky strategy to use to identify something as domestic. We know people for millennia have been burying wild animals alongside people,” he says.
Dog and wolf skeletons also can look extraordinarily alike—especially when there’s only a part of a skull or a single tooth to go on. “A lot of very, very early putative dogs, when you run the DNA on them, they actually come out as wolves,” says William Marsh, a paleogeneticist at the Natural History Museum of London. Previous studies have dated the oldest definitely-dog to around 10,900 years ago. By then, Marsh says, the “dogs are genetically very, very distinct from a wolves.” That means dogs must have been around, becoming more doggish, thousands of years earlier to the Upper Paleolithic period between 12,000 and 50,000 years ago.
Woof!!