Dogs and pointing - moving a hijack

[Stoid]

It was so removed from the initial topic I thought it deserved a thread of its own, but I was sharing in the “Far Side” thread about dogs and pointing. I found a good link to information about it.

Here’s an excerpt:

A chimp can follow the gaze of other chimps and figure out what they can and cannot see. That’s a skill that seems to be limited to great apes and humans.
Tomasello and his team wondered if such a rare ability extended to hand gestures and tested chimps to see if they could understand pointing. To their surprise, the chimps did badly, able to learn the meaning of a pointed finger only after lots of training.

The apparent explanation for these results was that pointing–and the social smarts behind it–required a humans-only level of intelligence and evolved in our ancestors only after they branched off from the ancestors of chimpanzees some 7 million years ago. When Tomasello suggested this idea to Hare, however, Hare demurred. “I said, ‘Um, Mike, I think my dogs can do that,’” Hare recalls.
Hare’s later research revealed that while chimps and even wolves lack an innate ability to understand what pointing means, dogs come by the knowledge naturally. They’re not limited to reading hands and fingers alone. Dogs understand what Hare means if he points with his foot or sets a piece of wood on top of a container with food inside. Even puppies understand, which means it can’t be a skill they need to learn. “This is something that dogs just do,” says Hare.
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1921614-3,00.html#ixzz0on8euVaZ

[Stoid]

If you continue reading, the research leads to a very interesting conclusion: that humans evolved the way we did in part because we are comfortable sharing.

VERY interesting.

[Chronos]

That’s absolutely fascinating. I had always taken it for granted that any reasonably-intelligent social animal would understand pointing, since the two most familiar examples (dogs and humans) do. But chimps can’t? It really makes me wonder, if we ever meet aliens, will we have any hope at all of communicating?

It’s even more fascinating that wolves can’t. Apparently, we were able to somehow breed that into dogs.

[Stoid]

@Chronos

That’s absolutely fascinating. I had always taken it for granted that any reasonably-intelligent social animal would understand pointing, since the two most familiar examples (dogs and humans) do. But chimps can’t? It really makes me wonder, if we ever meet aliens, will we have any hope at all of communicating?

It’s even more fascinating that wolves can’t. Apparently, we were able to somehow breed that into dogs.

Read the article, it’s got a lot of information, including how dogs sort of selected themselves to become what they are.