Domestic dogs and cats would possibly be a phenomenal evolutionary history of good fortune, yet we still know very little about how, why and when those animals were part of our human world.
Archaeologists have been tracking these human-animal relationships for decades, searching for clues in bones extracted from sites around the world. Geneticists are now helping to answer those questions and add to an image that is becoming and fitting increasingly confusing.
The dog has a very special (and unique) history with humans. The remains of Israel, Germany and central Russia make it clear that they were already part of our lives 15,000 years ago. This makes the dog the pet that existed before the agricultural revolution, one of the maximum basic adjustments in our own evolutionary history.
We know that the Eurasian grey wolf (Canis lupus) is the ancestor of all fashionable dogs. Early genetic studies (using now refuted “molecular clock” calculations) have controversially traced their domestication history to more than 100,000 years ago, while the most recent morphological studies have claimed that dog domestication began about 32,000 years ago, the last ice age.
Equally problematic remains the place where this first happened, with archaeological and genetic evidence pointing to single places or in Europe, the Near East, Russia or China. The most recent study, conducted through Cornell researchers, suggests that the original dogs can be discovered in Central Asia.
Zooarqueologists and geneticists (including me) from around the world lately are working together to verify those many claims and counter-allegations.
Cautious wolves domestic dogs
We used to think that dogs were the result of direct human intervention, with puppies captured, domesticated and finally bred. However, the now accepted view is that wolves have necessarily been “self-properly”.
Linked to wolves. In the distance. Mike Segar / Reuters
It was a longer-term relationship, first motivated not by direct human intervention but by the local ecological situations they created in this scenario, human remains have attracted some wolves closer to the camps and could possibly have led some Americans or even small herds. The presence of wolves so close to human settlements would possibly also have had the effect of preventing other harmful carnivores from getting too close, creating a flexible but mutually favorable relationship. have become increasingly accustomed to humans until new breeding pressures eventually replaced them from wolves to dogs.
Biologists would call such appointments “diner,” that is, when one organism benefits from another without causing destructive effects. Since then, archaeologists have used the term to describe the path to domestication of wolves, cats and even some other free-range animals However, the truth of what some call “protodomestication” is more complex. The transition from wolf to dog, or from wild boar to pig, comes to acquire a new and vital ability to exploit or depend entirely on the human environment.
There are extensive diner relationships between humans and carnivores; some wolves like to pick up trash, for example. Similarly, carnivores like cats would possibly have been highly dependent on predators of other (devastating) diner species, such as mice and rats. , which would possibly have infested human grain stocks. But diner animals rarely have an unbiased effect on humans because they consume crops, borrow food and provide a reservoir of diseases.
Because humans have such a great effect on local ecosystems, and there are so many other tactics that other organisms that live and exploit in new man-made environments can interact with us (and vice versa), we might want to replace the Want a way to communicate about the early stages of animal domestication that fully integrates the biological and cultural points involved. It would probably not place the food behavior of the disorderly Paleolithic indexed as an “evolving pressure”, but without It is imaginable that today we do not have dogs.
Assessing the key dates between humans and animals in the early stages of protodomestication is a huge challenge, but it will be vital to determine whether these citations were simply opportunistic or referred to a true dining route through which species have become dependent on humans before. be domesticated.
Living like me with my own dogs and cats, I know that I can at least be sure of two things: dogs are extremely happy to have controlled to grow themselves, while cats are completely distant from their remarkable abilities to tame humans.
Keith Dobney, professor and professor of 6th century human paleoecology, University of Aberdeen
This article was originally published in The Conversation. Lee the original article.
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