cheryl
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Why Do We Even Have Dogs? - Slate
Two recent papers explore how and why humans started hanging out with wolves.
Jet is many things. He’s my canine companion, raider of the trash, mail watchdog, irrepressible sniffer of faces, and a second alarm clock. Each morning when he hears Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger” play as my phone alarm, he wags his tail with a thump against the wall, and then (with permission) jumps up on the bed. It was during one such moment, pinned in place by about 75 pounds of German shepherd and thinking about just how many wiry black hairs were being freshly embedded into the duvet, that I wondered, Why do we even have dogs? They are lovable, but they are also loud, smelly carnivores.
As you may well know, dogs were domesticated from gray wolves, or an ancestor thereof (the process is hardly a straight line from wild thing to household pet). We literally pay homage to those origins when we buy kibble covered in all sorts of wild iconography or chatter about who’s the alpha in any given group of lovable pups. Dogs were also potentially domesticated more than once—evidence suggests our household companions came from a relatively recent instance in western Eurasia. But I was intrigued to read a new Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper which locates the origin of some of the very first dogs in the last Ice Age, about 23,000 years ago.
Two recent papers explore how and why humans started hanging out with wolves.
Jet is many things. He’s my canine companion, raider of the trash, mail watchdog, irrepressible sniffer of faces, and a second alarm clock. Each morning when he hears Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger” play as my phone alarm, he wags his tail with a thump against the wall, and then (with permission) jumps up on the bed. It was during one such moment, pinned in place by about 75 pounds of German shepherd and thinking about just how many wiry black hairs were being freshly embedded into the duvet, that I wondered, Why do we even have dogs? They are lovable, but they are also loud, smelly carnivores.
As you may well know, dogs were domesticated from gray wolves, or an ancestor thereof (the process is hardly a straight line from wild thing to household pet). We literally pay homage to those origins when we buy kibble covered in all sorts of wild iconography or chatter about who’s the alpha in any given group of lovable pups. Dogs were also potentially domesticated more than once—evidence suggests our household companions came from a relatively recent instance in western Eurasia. But I was intrigued to read a new Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper which locates the origin of some of the very first dogs in the last Ice Age, about 23,000 years ago.