Really fascinating, I love the implication that domestication is tied to juvenile characteristics (getting along in a group means acting more like a kid than an adult protecting your territory / breeding rights).
> "Are we domesticated in the sense of dogs? No. But I am comfortable saying that the first thing that has to happen to get a human from an apelike ancestor is a substantial increase in tolerance toward one another."
I recall reading many years ago how humans are fundamentally juvenile even when we reach adulthood, given our propensity to socialize and more importantly play.
It's interesting, though, because anyone who has ever owned a cat knows that they are only barely domesticated. It might be something in the canine brain that makes it easy to domesticate them.
Cats aren't as deeply domesticated as dogs but there's clearly been some breeding effect which you see when you compare a housecat against a true wildcat (felis silvestris). The main thing is that housecats are comfortable around humans as long as they're exposed to humans within a critical age window, even if they were born in the wild to a feral cat. In contrast, wildcats never become comfortable around humans and are effectively always feral.
Housecats also have a number of behaviors that seem only distantly related to things that would be useful in the wild, such as meowing for attention. Another weird behavior is when cats line up dead mice outside their owner's bedroom door like a present. There's clearly some relationship that they understand between themselves and their owner.
I don't think a lot of effort was put into actually intentionally breeding cats for domestication.
People seem to love them as semi wild animals and unlike dogs they aren't dangerous enough to be put down when they start biting people. On top of that a large percentage of the population are actually wild animals aka feral. Spend a lot of time with a kitten and it may become extremely affectionate, but we also habitually neuter them unlike the wild population. Go back 1,000 years and I suspect people acted similarly though without the neutering.
So the external evolutionary pressure for domestication doesn't seem nearly as strong as with those foxes, and might currently be going in the other direction.
> anyone who has ever owned a cat knows that they are only barely domesticated
just speculating, but wolves are "pack" animals, so they are already adapted to cooperating with each other and following a leader. perhaps that made them easier to train and domesticate. cats aren't like that except in the "lion pride" breeding sense which is perhaps a narrower skillset in terms of utility.
and of course, anybody who has owned a tiger will tell you that a cat is fairly domesticated :) I mention it because "domesticated" and "useful as a friend" might be two different things.
Whereas dogs were trained/bred/selected for specific purposes, I suspect cats were just kind of hanging out, following rodents which were were adjacent to human settlements.
It's easy to imagine humans simply tolerating them because they kept mice under control around grain and other food storage.
Intuitively that matches my perception of the cat-human relationship vs. the dog-human relationship.
I remember reading once that cats pretend domesticated themselves. Rather then changing themselves to be more docile and acceptable to humans they adapted traits that just make them seem more appealing to humans.
It's because dogs are wolf with the Williams Syndrome. A DNA deletion syndrome which reduces aggression and increases empathy. In humans the syndrome produces individuals with characteristic facial features, a big smile and friendly traits.
Edit: visibly dog lovers are not too keen on learning that their best friends have a genetic abnormality. But that doesn't make it less true, it's pretty well documented. It doesn't mean that dogs are lesser somehow, they are still perfectly viable it the wild (well not the races resulting from the most extreme genetic selections, but most of them)
A few years ago someone was raising new questions about the validity of this study, it doesn't seem mentioned in the wikipedia page and I don't know how/if it was resolved or settled:
Ancient Romans and Greeks would write things about their dogs and have custom grave stones made, one of my favorites reads:
"My eyes were wet with tears, our little dog, when I bore thee (to the grave)... So, Patricus, never again shall thou give me a thousand kisses. Never canst thou be contentedly in my lap. In sadness have I buried thee, and thou deservist. In a resting place of marble, I have put thee for all time by the side of my shade. In thy qualities, sagacious thou wert like a human being. Ah, me! What a loved companion have we lost!"
I've made this argument many times and it always raises eyebrows and induces shrugs. We as a species co-evolved with some animals and not others. Our partnership with extends deep into the mists of pre-history. We and they have co-evolved to an extent to be better companions. Eating a dog is a profound betrayal unlike that of eating a horse. Come at me
I am OK with some cultures not eating some meats: pork for the muslims or jews, horse for some Western countries, sometimes rabbit. Where I'm from (Italy) we eat both horse and rabbits.
But I too draw the line at eating dogs and cats, except during extreme survival situations where it's eat your pet (or fellow human) to avoid starvation. I feel eating canids and felids as taboo as eating a primate, or eating a human.
I would argue, the native american tribes, who also did eat their dogs, treated them better overall, than humanity does today on average. So many dogs bred for running around, are lucky today, if they get to walk around outside for more than 20 minutes. This I would call betrayal.
I wouldn't eat a horse either, but otherwise agree. Dogs have evolved the skills to fit in human social structures. They really do become part of families.
"Of note, it's unclear whether the dog died a natural death, or whether it was killed to be buried with its human. An analysis of its remains may reveal this mystery."
What are the odds that the dog died of natural causes at exactly the same time as the owner?
> Abuse of a dog or cat is a crime against civilization itself.
That logic doesn't follow. If dogs predate civilization, then how could it be a crime against civilization? Your article is about dogs in primitive hunter gatherer societies. Not civilizations. Besides, many civilizations have thrived abusing dogs and cats. You might want to read what the bible says about 'unclean' dogs. Or why we have the saying 'there is more than one way to skin a cat'.
Or how 'civilizations' dispatched of dogs not too long ago.
Not to mention the millions of cats/dogs that are 'euthanized' every year or the hundreds of million of cats and dogs that are castrated ( which people oddly don't consider to be abuse ). Heck, it's not hard to argue that imprisoning animals in your home as 'pets' is abuse.
If anything, civilization is an abuse against dogs and cats.
Humans and dogs were two borderline species until dogs were domesticated. But together the two were so complementary, that they never looked back. The dogs had the speed, teeth, smell and baby sitting while humans had the weapons, rock throwing, intelligence and cooking. It was and is a killer combination that rose to the top of the animal world on earth so far.
It's tricky for women to raise children in the wild. Especially once kids get to the ages between 2.5 and 8 when they'll want to explore their ever changing environment but mom still has to look for plants and berries and keep an eye any dangers and carnivores that are around. Dogs protect their own little ones in the wild and readily help to keep an eye on the human youngsters in the same way. Further more dogs will sound the alarm when needed. It's one more helping, important hand, that dogs bring to the bargain.
It's a bit of a fringe theory but there's a suggestion that the human 'alliance' with wolves gave us the edge over Neanderthals and other predators and ensured that it was us who ultimately survived as a species. It's a nice thought for a dog lover.
Why wouldn't neanderthals form an alliance with wolves too? Especially considering Neanderthals had a multi-hundred-thousand year head start in wolf range compared to homo sapiens.
It’s an interesting question. I don’t know if there’s any evidence of wolf domestication by Neanderthals. If they didn’t domesticate them, it would be interesting to try to work out why – maybe there’s a subtle difference in psychology between H. Sapiens and H. Neanderthalensis that enabled us to bridge that gap but not them?
Again we are in the realms of speculation upon speculation, but Neanderthals didn't have sclera (whites of the eyes) which according to the co-operative eye hypothesis as regards to domesticated hunting dogs allows them to follow our gaze. It does seem odd that Neanderthals didn't try to domesticate them too - surely the first reaction on seeing humans and dogs bring down a mammoth or corral large deer would be 'got to get us some of that', but as sibling comments say we don't know much about them really.
On this topic I saw this great documentary called "Man's first friend" from 2008.[1].
Also speaking of northern Italy, as a dog owner, I am fully behind this[2] proposal to DNA test dogs and punish anyone leaving dog poop on the streets.
I also enjoyed the probably not very historically accurate movie Alpha, about a prehistoric young man domesticating a wolf: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4244998/
Isn’t solving trust issues with further mistrust leads to an even lower trust in the end? (genuinely interested because “low-trust/high-trust communities” concept is a topic I know nothing about.)
It is absolutely not good for the environment. Your dog does not eat a local, natural diet. There are more dogs than could be locally and naturally sustained.
Dogs are little more than farm animals, in the sense that we're farming them for companionship. They might be our friends now that we have killed all the ones that would defy our commands.
Look at any wild animal, do they want to be owned, do they want to be put on a leash? Of course not. Animals want to be free like any other living being, but just like cows, dogs would not survive on their own because we have artificially selected them. Imagine aliens capturing humans, breeding them in captivity until they are docile little creatures that cannot survive on their own. It's easy to feel sorry for farm animals because we eat them, but in a way people who love pets are not any better than the farmer, despite the culture thinking otherwise.
> Animals want to be free like any other living being,
That's a nice thought, but in reality there are plenty of humans even that just get overwhelmed and scared at the thought of freedom, whether their own or other people's, and actively demand, seek, and create rigid and oppressive systems of rules and restrictions in order to trade freedom away for predictability. Otherwise… The entire human world would likely be shaped quite different from how it currently is.
Our morals don't map cleanly onto physical reality, and values like "freedom" are unfortunately still relatively inconsequential next to causalities like "death", "killing", "starvation", and "culling". Does a tapeworm "want to be free" from its host? How about a male anglerfish, which only has a nervous system complex enough to find a larger female anglerfish which it can latch onto while its entire body is subsumed away? Animals want whatever animals are neurologically wired to want, humans included, and only sometimes does that align with our higher ideals of life having intrinsic worth. The nature of things simply is, and in a lot of cases, I think the ways we try to assign moral judgements to it are projecting our own social instincts onto ecological and cognitive systems that do not share our values.
Certainly, the power dynamics, amount of control, and relative levels of awareness between humans and pets are… Would be rightfully horrifying, though, if the alternative were a relationship of equal peers.
Ok, sure, maybe not all animals would feel that way, but I think probably all mammals or at least the smarter ones (relatively speaking). If dogs "want" to be pets, it's for the same reasons cows "want" to be farm animals, but it would be far-fetched to say a cow wants to be slaughtered and eaten. Sure a pet dog is not food, but compared to their wolf ancestors, they are far from their ideal natural state (if they have one at this point, which I guess is arguable, just like with cows).
I guess I'm mostly pointing to a double standard between pets and farm animals. I eat meat, so I'm not advocating for any solution on either case here, just making an observation that potentially we are farming animals for more than food, and there aren't any movements advocating for the release of pets or alternatives to animal companionship.
> Look at any wild animal, do they want to be owned, do they want to be put on a leash?
Numerous wild animals can be held as pets, without going through domestication, so apparently they do. If you feed them, they may have no reason to mind the leash, life is hard in the wild.
I think we would need to make a distinction between holding a wild animal in captivity temporarily and owning one as a pet or as an exhibition at the zoo. When people help wild animals that is of course good for them, and it helps preserve wild life. Having them as pets on the other hand is a different matter, and I would be very skeptical even if the animal seems happy because ultimately it would not know or have awareness of what is really going on. That said, it's a complicated issue, so it's not like I'm saying no one should own pets.
Thank you for saying that, it's a bitter pill for a lot of people to swallow. I suspect most folks who struggle with squaring the facts just haven't spent much time around livestock.
Readit News
Interestingly, while they were selected purely for lack of aggression towards humans they started to develop dog-like physical traits.
Hasn't been replicated yet, and doubtfully will, but interesting.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_silver_fox
> "Are we domesticated in the sense of dogs? No. But I am comfortable saying that the first thing that has to happen to get a human from an apelike ancestor is a substantial increase in tolerance toward one another."
Housecats also have a number of behaviors that seem only distantly related to things that would be useful in the wild, such as meowing for attention. Another weird behavior is when cats line up dead mice outside their owner's bedroom door like a present. There's clearly some relationship that they understand between themselves and their owner.
People seem to love them as semi wild animals and unlike dogs they aren't dangerous enough to be put down when they start biting people. On top of that a large percentage of the population are actually wild animals aka feral. Spend a lot of time with a kitten and it may become extremely affectionate, but we also habitually neuter them unlike the wild population. Go back 1,000 years and I suspect people acted similarly though without the neutering.
So the external evolutionary pressure for domestication doesn't seem nearly as strong as with those foxes, and might currently be going in the other direction.
just speculating, but wolves are "pack" animals, so they are already adapted to cooperating with each other and following a leader. perhaps that made them easier to train and domesticate. cats aren't like that except in the "lion pride" breeding sense which is perhaps a narrower skillset in terms of utility.
and of course, anybody who has owned a tiger will tell you that a cat is fairly domesticated :) I mention it because "domesticated" and "useful as a friend" might be two different things.
It's easy to imagine humans simply tolerating them because they kept mice under control around grain and other food storage.
Intuitively that matches my perception of the cat-human relationship vs. the dog-human relationship.
Edit: visibly dog lovers are not too keen on learning that their best friends have a genetic abnormality. But that doesn't make it less true, it's pretty well documented. It doesn't mean that dogs are lesser somehow, they are still perfectly viable it the wild (well not the races resulting from the most extreme genetic selections, but most of them)
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/russian-foxes-tameness-d...
Hence why I added the bit about not being replicated, it's far from settled science. Intriguing though, IMHO.
"My eyes were wet with tears, our little dog, when I bore thee (to the grave)... So, Patricus, never again shall thou give me a thousand kisses. Never canst thou be contentedly in my lap. In sadness have I buried thee, and thou deservist. In a resting place of marble, I have put thee for all time by the side of my shade. In thy qualities, sagacious thou wert like a human being. Ah, me! What a loved companion have we lost!"
https://www.livescience.com/stone-age-dog-burial.html
Abuse of a dog or cat is a crime against civilization itself.
But I too draw the line at eating dogs and cats, except during extreme survival situations where it's eat your pet (or fellow human) to avoid starvation. I feel eating canids and felids as taboo as eating a primate, or eating a human.
Maybe when we were nomads and the dogs roamed around freely around the tribe.
But most dogs today are locked in, most of the time and when they get outside, they are on a leash. Totally dependant on their human masters.
I don't think I would describe that relationship as a partnership.
Then there is the concept of breeding them, to establish certain "cute" traits, but cause great pain and misery to the animal:
https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualzucht (german)
I would argue, the native american tribes, who also did eat their dogs, treated them better overall, than humanity does today on average. So many dogs bred for running around, are lucky today, if they get to walk around outside for more than 20 minutes. This I would call betrayal.
"Of note, it's unclear whether the dog died a natural death, or whether it was killed to be buried with its human. An analysis of its remains may reveal this mystery."
What are the odds that the dog died of natural causes at exactly the same time as the owner?
> Abuse of a dog or cat is a crime against civilization itself.
That logic doesn't follow. If dogs predate civilization, then how could it be a crime against civilization? Your article is about dogs in primitive hunter gatherer societies. Not civilizations. Besides, many civilizations have thrived abusing dogs and cats. You might want to read what the bible says about 'unclean' dogs. Or why we have the saying 'there is more than one way to skin a cat'.
Or how 'civilizations' dispatched of dogs not too long ago.
https://archive.nytimes.com/cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/...
Not to mention the millions of cats/dogs that are 'euthanized' every year or the hundreds of million of cats and dogs that are castrated ( which people oddly don't consider to be abuse ). Heck, it's not hard to argue that imprisoning animals in your home as 'pets' is abuse.
If anything, civilization is an abuse against dogs and cats.
Dead Comment
Which tracks with the neolithic transition when we started "domesticating" animals for all purposes
Also speaking of northern Italy, as a dog owner, I am fully behind this[2] proposal to DNA test dogs and punish anyone leaving dog poop on the streets.
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=talBvZ5x8sY&t=4882s
2. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/17/italian-provin...
Also it would depend on the specific commune and not a country-wide requirement.
Dead Comment
Plus dog poop is ecologically good for the environment and fertilizes nature.
https://www.cdc.gov/parasites/toxocariasis/
https://www.popsci.com/environment/dog-poop-pollution/
Was news to me as a dog owner who allows our dog to do her business in the back yard (but would never allow it on a public walkway/area).
https://lawnlove.com/blog/is-dog-poop-bad-for-grass/
Look at any wild animal, do they want to be owned, do they want to be put on a leash? Of course not. Animals want to be free like any other living being, but just like cows, dogs would not survive on their own because we have artificially selected them. Imagine aliens capturing humans, breeding them in captivity until they are docile little creatures that cannot survive on their own. It's easy to feel sorry for farm animals because we eat them, but in a way people who love pets are not any better than the farmer, despite the culture thinking otherwise.
That's a nice thought, but in reality there are plenty of humans even that just get overwhelmed and scared at the thought of freedom, whether their own or other people's, and actively demand, seek, and create rigid and oppressive systems of rules and restrictions in order to trade freedom away for predictability. Otherwise… The entire human world would likely be shaped quite different from how it currently is.
Our morals don't map cleanly onto physical reality, and values like "freedom" are unfortunately still relatively inconsequential next to causalities like "death", "killing", "starvation", and "culling". Does a tapeworm "want to be free" from its host? How about a male anglerfish, which only has a nervous system complex enough to find a larger female anglerfish which it can latch onto while its entire body is subsumed away? Animals want whatever animals are neurologically wired to want, humans included, and only sometimes does that align with our higher ideals of life having intrinsic worth. The nature of things simply is, and in a lot of cases, I think the ways we try to assign moral judgements to it are projecting our own social instincts onto ecological and cognitive systems that do not share our values.
Certainly, the power dynamics, amount of control, and relative levels of awareness between humans and pets are… Would be rightfully horrifying, though, if the alternative were a relationship of equal peers.
I guess I'm mostly pointing to a double standard between pets and farm animals. I eat meat, so I'm not advocating for any solution on either case here, just making an observation that potentially we are farming animals for more than food, and there aren't any movements advocating for the release of pets or alternatives to animal companionship.
Numerous wild animals can be held as pets, without going through domestication, so apparently they do. If you feed them, they may have no reason to mind the leash, life is hard in the wild.
Deleted Comment