Dogs have pretty decent eyesight and generally excellent hearing but they live in a world of smell which is almost a language to them. A cat, or a raccoon, or even a coyote are going to smell very different from another dog, and dogs also memorize the smells of other dogs like names. A dog can certainly recognize another dog that they have previously met from a distance by sight or sound by association.
Thomas Jefferson was such a monumental hypocrite and vacillator it is difficult to know exactly what he believed, but he does seem to have generally regarded black Africans as people even as he defended the institution of slavery on pragmatic grounds (mostly on repaying the debts he had inherited, and in pacifying powerful Virginia businessmen). If Jefferson were alive today he would be a lobbyist promoting an interest that he didn’t actually believe in or an adman pushing a product he knew to be harmful. His having children with Sally Hemings (which has been almost completely inarguably demonstrated by genetic analysis despite continued objection by the Jefferson family) is as much problematic because of their relative ages (Hemings was likely 14 when they first ‘had relations’ even though the Hemings family insists that she was 16, while Jefferson was 44 or 46 depending on whose story you believe) as their master-slave relationship as it is clear that Sally Hemings was canny enough to negotiate elements of the affair including considerable privileges and the ultimately free status of offspring even though she technically remained property of Jefferson herself.
I get dogs have an amazing sense of smell and perceive the world differently than I do.
I walked my dog around 8,760 times in her life (give or take…close enough). And that was just one dog. All dogs I am somewhere around 40,000+ times.
Was the wind ALWAYS blowing at my dog so she could smell the dog a block away? I sure did not pay attention to wind direction but I am willing to bet it was not always towards us.
Or, is it more likely I noticed my dogs spotting the other dog by eyesight and it was not all scent?
if you could translate a dog’s though into human speech 95% of it would be about how other dog’s asses smell.
Dogs can recognize each other by sight, but often based upon a pre-existing association with smell. This is not to say that they can’t distinguish between ‘dog’ and ‘not-a-dog’ by sight but their dominant sense is smell.
Smell isn’t purely downwind. In relatively still air, they might still be smelling other dogs from a block away in any direction. Or, if the other dog was moving, too, maybe they noticed that the dog was right here before they noticed that it is over there.
That some modern humans don’t recognize the humanity of other humans is nothing more than a convenient fiction to justify ill-treatment. They know better: they have sex with them. Nobody bothers to accuse them of bestiality, even those others who believe in non-humanness. It shouldn’t have any relevance in an anthropological or paleontological thread.
My guess about the answer to the OP’s question is that recognition goes way back. Back to the beginning of the Homo genus, humans looked and acted distinctively from other animals. Some fuzziness might have occurred when Australopithecines overlapped early Homos but no doubt that was long resolved by the time sapiens emerged.
To be fair to them, though, we’d have to take today’s humans and leave them out in the savanna without clothes or tools for a while to get the right je ne sais quoi of true wilderness.
I noticed my dog recognizing other dogs by sight. I witnessed it happening repeatedly.
There is NO WAY it was scent that was triggering her. There were dozens of dogs in the area at any given moment not to mention wind direction. She may have caught their scent but she only reacted on sight. And on sight she did clearly react. Something she did not do just walking around and (maybe) catching a scent.
Does no one else here own a dog? This is not unusual.
Some do, some don’t. After all, the group of “Jefferson’s descendants” and the sub-group of “Jefferson’s White descendants” are all individuals who vary, including variations in whether or not they’re bigots.
Also disingenuous to say “Jefferson’s family” and “Hemings family” if you mean descendants of Jefferson. Although not all Jefferson descents are related to Hemings, all Hemings descents are part of Jefferson’s descendants.
There may be groups of humans, that is anything that existed in the genus Homo, who ran around naked but they ALL used tools. There are no humans/hominids without tools. It is possible but not proven that at least some species in genus Australopithecus also used tools. Tool making and tool use is as characteristic of genus Homo as upright posture and bipedal locomotion.
I’ve long wondered if interacting with different species of Homo our early ancestors would regard other related species sort of like how our stories treat ogres, elves, dwarves, and the like - something like humans but different and sometimes in the uncanny valley. I’m dubious other types of humans were the source of such tales - they seem far too distant in the past for that and there’s enough variation in H. sapiens to generate tales of unusually tall or short tribes of people - but I wonder if that’s how they would have been regarded.
Particularly if it’s true that H. sapiens had roughly twice the natural lifespan of H. neanderthal (not proven but a hypothesis), along with our greater average height and more slender build maybe they regarded us as elves: long-lived, fragile, and terribly clever. Maybe we looked at them and saw ogres or dwarves - stronger than us and more durable, maybe not so intelligent but not dumb animals, either, and potentially very dangerous adversaries. Note I use the fantasy race terms very loosely here. Each group saw the other as not quite them but nonetheless not like other animals, either.
I wonder if other species under Homo would have triggered an uncanny valley reaction in us. I wonder if that uncanny valley reaction is a vestige of a time when it was important to not only recognize different tribes of our own species but also be able to quickly spot groups of other related species. (the ideas not being original with me, but I found them intriguing as a thought experiment). I expect different humans could react violently to each other, especially when using or going after similar resources. Maybe other times they could co-exist peacefully, or at least as peacefully as bordering hunter-gatherer groups do (that is to say - sometimes peaceful, sometimes at war).
I’m not so sure that that’s the standard: If we ever did meet elves, I’m sure plenty of humans would have sex with them (or at least, want to: I’m not sure if the elves would feel the same way), while still recognizing them as something other than human. Likewise for aliens or angels, at least as they’re commonly envisioned. Humans seem to have a category for “beings that aren’t human but that it’s OK to have sex with”.
It might be body language, dogs are good at reading that. I recall an experiment where they released a dog in a large circle of identically dressed people, on a still day so smell wouldn’t reach the dog. The dog looked confused until a signal was given and everyone started waving, upon which the dog immediately recognized which of the people was their owner and ran for them.
Their eyes don’t quite have our acuity but they are very good at analyzing motion.
Agreeing with that. Bear in mind that we’re talking about a species in which some members will have sex with a sheep. Or with a blow up doll. And in which most people can be aroused by pictures on a screen.
Do you mean the enslaved people? Yes, that was generally rape – I would say always if the person wasn’t first freed when that was possible. It’s also obviously rape with the sheep. I don’t think it’s possible to rape a blow up doll.
But I don’t think the willingness to have sex with, say, elves, if there were any around, is usually a desire to rape.
Humans are an outbreeding species. While we have built into us a strong attraction to the familiar and a fear of the unfamiliar, we also have built into us a strong attraction to the unfamiliar. The relative strength of these impulses varies with the individual, and the encouragement or discouragement of them varies with the society. Ours strongly discourages sex with animals (justifiably, in my opinion) – but we are animals ourselves, and other societies, let alone other individuals, may well have drawn the sexual-attraction line to include other hominins even while recognizing them as members of different species. Since we seem to have wiped out all the other hominins, one way or another, that’s not a possible issue now – but it’s certainly possible in fantasy, and there’s a whole lot of it written in fantasy.
I meant of course modern clothes and tools, so that those outer wonder-layers would not interfere with the core of being Homo, the way that the Aztecs mistook the Spanish for gods.
That caveat says it all. Thus far, supernatural creatures have all been invented by human writers, so their traits mimic and usually exaggerate human traits. Circular reasoning. Thousands of such types of creatures have been invented in every known human culture that left suitable records. The names of these types sometimes depict similar creatures and sometimes one name will encompass many variations over place and time, so beware generalizations. At base, though, they can be sorted into two major families: the Fair (fairies and others coming from a word meaning essentially “magic”) and the Monsters (coming from a word meaning a bad omen or something abnormal). The Fair, with whom sex is available and even preferred, are mostly human-looking and often supernaturally beautiful. Monsters can be human or bestial - their natures determine their sexuality. Leprechauns are not noted as sexual partners despite being quite human in mien. The half human centaurs are nearly always male and associated with rape. The half human Minotaur only devoured his victims.
The Gods were above these distinctions, at least in the familiar Greek and Roman incarnations. Zeus could have sex while in the form of a bull or swan and other gods and goddesses took human lovers but that merely indicated that they saw humans as toys to be played with and women as sex toys. Until recently, the vast majority of the tellers of supernatural stories were men, who saw the world allegorically through male eyes.
No doubt outliers abound given the size of the whole. But I wouldn’t trust writers of the supernatural to be accurate on sex any more than I would trust writers of internet porn to be accurate on sex.
Fictional fantasy creatures don’t say much about what actual other species would be like. But they do say plenty about human conceptions of “otherness”, because they are human conceptions.
And of course, we know that H. sapiens mated with both Neanderthals and Denisovians, so obviously someone found that cross-species match acceptable. And even if some of that was rape (and in which direction?), I don’t think it’s safe to say that it all was. Surely, there had to be some 'thals who were into saps, and some saps who were into 'thals, and sometimes they met each other.
Or, for that matter, they may have recognized “different species” but not thought of this as a bar to whatever form of marriage may have been in use, let alone to casual sexual relations. Some of it may even have been ‘need to find someone who’s not in a forbidden degree of relationship for the next generation to hook up with – hey, those folks would do!’
I said back in post 26 that I thought recognition went back to the beginnings of Homo so sex was obviously acceptable a million years later. It’s only in the very early days of, say, habilis that we might have questions about. Other possible species, like ergaster and rudolfensis, are so similar that some don’t consider them separate species, but if they were their interaction is very likely.
For that matter, some don’t consider Neanderthals and Denisovians to be separate species from sapiens, either. That’s the minority view among anthropologists, but species boundaries (like everything else in biology) are always a bit fuzzy.
