This didn’t do much in Great Debates. Not so much a Question, but a General topic of discussion.
Professor Allman has material in his books claiming a long relationship of man and dog. I have lunch with this old guy who’s a bit traditional and religious. I didn’t want to discusss the point of the OP, but the dog he was quite interested in. He summed it up as “so it was Adam and Eve and Fido, then.” I gave him a polite laugh.
Some more background: amazon reviews … customer reviews include:
“Several things came together,” says Allman, who specializes in evolutionary biology. "Recently, Robert Wayne at UCLA has shown through mitochondrial DNA that dogs are basically domesticated wolves, and that their domestication occurred much earlier than previously thought–as much as 135,000 years ago. (see press release )
Since anthropologist Tim White discovered some erect-walking human ancestors that were approx. 4.4 million years old (though I don’t know if his find is generally accepted), I don’t see how 135,000 years of presence with dogs is the reason for the survival of humans.
La franchise ne consiste pas à dire tout ce que l’on pense, mais à penser tout ce que l’on dit.
H. de Livry
Stringer and McKie in “African Exodus” discuss in an easily undestandable form genetic evidence that there was a period within the last 200 000 years where the population of humans collapsed briefly for some reason. They call it a population crash. It could have been the Neanderthals that happened to survive.
But, back to the dogs. What has anyone read on this, or is it strictly Allman that is supporting this idea.
If you think this theory is bizarre, you should check out Terrence McKenna’s (“ethnobotanist” extraordinaire) theory about early man, cattle, and psilocybin (sp?) mushrooms in a symbiotic relationship in which man developed his advanced verbal abilities as a result of hallucinogen-induced glossalia. it’s a hoot. One of those theories that are so nuts that I wish they were true.
On the whole, the study of prehistoric times has been helped out by a lot of fields, such as pollen analysis. But sometimes the help comes from a field that you wonder how it has much to do with man. You gotta admit, though, thta some of these young professors have ingenious ways of getting grant money!
