That dog used to be seen at every show following The Grateful Dead all over the country. But after Jerry died, the dog just gave up touring and got off the Further bus and onto local transit. Good times.
This is not true - you see civilization and agriculture all the way up to the Great Lakes, practically.
I consulted an expert on the topic and we were able to come to some conclusions.
Clicker the golden retriever is a good boy (Yes he IS!)
He does not in fact need to go out at the moment
As far as our co-adaptive evolution he has no opinion at present but I am confident he will let me know if he ever comes to one
I have heard it argued that cats had a hand in helping us modernize - by rat-catching at the first grain stores, allowing us to build up a surplus and hence devote time to non-food-related intellectual pursuits. I don’t buy it, though - the Americas didn’t have domesticated cats, and they managed just fine.
Domesticated cats even today are not very domesticated and pretty close to wild. I heard that they revert back to wild status in 3 generations. Well technically feral status, which just means a return to wild from domesticated. It is their wild nature that goes after the mice and rats, not the domesticated. Domesticated cats would tend to not do as well, especially when they can get their food from the hand of man.
So even if there were no domesticated cats in that area, does not mean there were no small wild cat creatures hanging out around where mice and rats would be gathering.
And one or two shot into space.
I would agree that dogs helped us become what we are. They served as food, guarding our food, helping us hunt and providing a certain “alarm” role while we farmed. They were also among the first draft animals in some cultures and may - may - have taught us the basics we needed to domesticate/selectively breed other species. But that’s just off the top of my head without really going into any research.
Everything I’ve heard puts wolf domestication around 30-40,000 years ago. Got a cite for that 135,000 figure?
Also, we’ve evolved symbiotically with dogs for a long time. Purposeful breeding isn’t as old as dogs are. They got our scraps and fire, we got their protection, and that turned into companionship and working dogs. In a sense dogs made us what we are, because we evolved (recently at least) to depend on them for agriculture and protection. Could we have done that without them? Probably. Nevertheless, we did it with them, so I don’t mind sharing credit.
and still wasn’t in the top 100 voted “Worst Breath on Public Transit”
Actually they played a large part in the development of life sciences like medicine, behavior and psychology. From Renee Descartes’ horrendous vivisection of live dogs in front of audiences where he taught people that they were automatons simply programmed to scream (but the actual lessons were things like flow of blood through the mammalian body), to Pavlov that someone else mentioned, to product testing of things like heart pacemakers and cosmetics, to today where some exceptional dogs are taught to tolerate the noise of fMRI machines so that their brains are studied without killing them for dissection.
Dogs may not have “made” humans what we are, but they do form our characters and shine light on the lack thereof. I volunteer in dog rescue and have seen some really sick shit. There are people out there who are just amazingly wonderful. There are also monsters among us so sadistic that it’s hard for the average person to believe they’re real. I firmly believe that the way you treat animals shows what your character is like, and it applies both on an individual level as well as societal.
Dogs are also a pretty amazing species. They have the intellect to be able to intuitively understand human facial expressions - in our terms not theirs. Meaning for example, when my dog sees me smiling he knows that I am happy and not snarling (the dog version of showing teeth). Many dogs also understand pointing and are eager to work collaboratively with us. Our nearest zoological cousins (as scientists see it), higher primates like chimpanzees fail at all of those accomplishments. I’ve also noticed anecdotally (but haven’t seen mentioned in any animal/dog behavior book) that my dogs understand what a beckon means. I make eye contact, say my dog’s name, and make a little hand-wave toward me, and she walks over to me. Both of my dogs do that, in fact, and it wasn’t something that I trained them to do. I know their backgrounds so I know nobody trained them to understand that.
I’m a lifelong cat lover, but it’s pretty clear to me that dogs have a higher level of intuitive understanding and natural communication with people.
Never mind, I found it myself. The [as much as] 135,000 years old number comes from mitochondrial DNA evidence. Archeological evidence only shows dog-like canids appearing around 35,000 years ago. I think that shows that this was a long time in the making and that humans and dogs evolved together symbiotically rather than humans consciously domesticating dogs the way we domesticated cattle or horses a (relatively) few thousand years ago.
I’m certainly not saying that dogs aren’t a valuable contributor to human development. That’s not disputable. I just don’t see a smoking gun correlation between dogs and agriculture.
Responding to critical1 about the ice age… if the ice age was the limiting factor on agriculture, then does it make sense to give dogs the credit?
I’ve seen this show a few times, and while it is interesting, it relies heavily on the idea of one guy and he does a better job at making that assertion than substantiating it. And the show is a bit long in the tooth-- 8 years old, which is about 56 in dog years!
That’s not the accepted number and your cite isn’t very convincing:
It doesn’t make sense that dogs evolved from Asian wolves while our species was still stuck in Africa.
I doubt this is true. I believe you didn’t purposely train them, but you almost certainly conditioned them to do this. When you trained them to ‘come’ on command, you probably beckoned some times as well. When you beckoned and they came you praised them or did something else that they took to be a reward.
My own dogs also know what a beckon is, but only in special circumstances. At night my wife often goes to bed before I do. So as not to wake her, I beckon the dogs with a hand motion to follow me to let them out for the last time. They do not understand that beckon when outside. However when it’s time to go in if I make a full arm over the head come on motion, they know that. They also know if I stand at the bottom of the stairs from the drive to the front door and point up the stairs, that they are to go up.
They do not, however, understand these gestures in other contexts, so I don’t think they use inductive reasoning like a human would.
There was a joke I read here on the Dope not too long ago:
Pavlov is sitting in a bar when the phone rings. He leaps to his feet and yells, “Oh, crap! I forgot to feed the dogs!”
Aren’t they trying to make synthetic dog noses now since some dogs can sniff out cancer?
See, your mistake is in assuming that I trained them to come on command. They did this long before they ever got any obedience training. But to be perfectly clear, I think what happens is that I use their natural sense of curiosity to make them come to me. Sometimes I need do nothing more than beckon, but most times I need to also turn around and walk away and then they’ll follow to see what I’m up to.
Just a fun story: my dogs are retired racing greyhounds, which means their only training (aside from running as fast as possible on an oval track) is to be obedient to their daily schedule. Greyhounds are independent hunters, so have a “what’s in it for me” mentality when it comes to training. Some people view this as being untrainable, but it just takes more patience and lots of bribes. Anyway, I enrolled my duo in Canine Good Citizen class after having them for a few years, and by then they knew pretty well that they were never allowed off leash outside of a fenced area. In the CGC test where the instructor attached a 50-foot leash to test recall, both my hounds embarrassed me by not running to me. When they were turned “loose” (except for the long lead laying on the ground, the other end of which I was holding 50 feet away) they both looked around in puzzlement before slowly meandering toward me. Meanwhile I was bouncing up and down calling them in a happy voice and even occasionally making like I was going to run away, anything to stimulate a chase response. No joy, walking slowly was apparently all they were willing to do for me that day.
I suspect Dogs were most useful as an alarm bell, for hunting, and (much later in human development) for herding other animals. Not so much for agriculture.
Cats are more useful for agriculture - hunting mice and rats that eat grains. Though they don’t really need to be very ‘domesticated’ to do that. Merely tolerated or encouraged, like barn cats usually are.
My suspicion is that dogs first became ‘domesticated’ in a way similar to cats - that is, they were attracted to human encampments (not to humans) because they had food: in the case of early humans, that would be bones and scraps for scavenging wolves; in the case of cats, grain that attracted rodents.
The wolves and humans would gradually grow used to each other’s presence, and some basic ground rules established - as in, the wolves could have the scraps, but no more. In return, what did the humans get? Well, garbage disposal for one; but also, perhaps the wolves would menace other animals or humans intruding into the camp - or at least, raise the alarm. I suspect this was their earliest ‘use’.
Only much later (I think) would wolves, now dogs, in effect be incorporated into human society as ‘pack members’ and be used for stuff like hunting.
Evolved is the wrong word to use about our relationship with dogs. Evolution takes much longer than the relatively short time that dogs have been domesticated. Somewhere between 10,000 and 30,000 years. This is too short a time to impact human evolution.
Even the statement about humans evolving from hunter/gatherers is not correct because we haven’t really evolved in the short time since we lived that way. The earliest Cro-Magnon remains are only around 50,000 years old. We are still just Cro-Magnon, (with some Neanderthal thrown in), with better clothes and houses. I am particularly fond of better shoes. But we haven’t really changed physically, only socially, and maybe not much of that.
What the domestication of dogs and other animals affected could better be described as societal progress. Domestication of dogs help us to find food and other resources and to protect them once acquired. Dogs became important in protecting and helping to control the other livestock we tamed for food, and helped to protect and alarm us to intrusions. By filling this role they became part of human society.
The dog was integral to the transition from roaming hunter/gatherers to more established communities. But it has been too short a time to call it evolution, more like enhanced adaptation.
It’s thought that most of the physical characteristics that we associate with the various racial/ethnic groups we see in humans today evolved during that time period. That’s too short a time period for a large mammal such as us to evolve into a new species, but not to evolve, generally speaking. Especially when you start screwing around with the distant cousins (Neanderthals and the like).