Posted on 10/29/2011 6:12:54 AM PDT by Pharmboy
Edited on 10/29/2011 7:30:38 AM PDT by Admin Moderator. [history]
What the evolutionary history of the dog tells us about another animal: ourselves. From a cave in France, a new picture has emerged of canines as our prehistoric soulmates.
Chauvet Cave in southern France houses the oldest representational paintings ever discovered. Created some 32,000 years ago, the 400-plus images of large grazing animals and the predators who hunted them form a multi-chambered Paleolithic bestiary. Many scholars believe that these paintings mark the emergence of a recognizably modern human consciousness. We feel that we know their creators, even though they are from a time and place as alien as another planet.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
Release the hounds! ping...
Doggie ping!
You may be right...but with no signs of a struggle in the hardened dirt, they assumed the best.
The struggle comes at the end of the trail.
I think they’re drawing a lot of conclusions from finding two different kinds of footprints at the same place - all that means is that a boy was once in that cave, and a dog/wolf was once in that cave, but not necessarily at the same time. However, I don’t argue with the idea that humans and dogs have been cooperating for ages, each influencing the other for the better. There are several very interesting documentaries on available on Netflix that explore the relationship between humans and dogs.
Its pretty obvious that humans and dogs have been together for a very long time. I personally think it began as an unintentional interaction with both scavenging kills from larger predators and what was left behind by each other.
My feelings exactly.
Whoops - thought this was an article about the background of the average congressman.
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| GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother & Ernest_at_the_Beach | |
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Thanks Pharmboy. |
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Cool article
I watched a Nat Geo program last week on just this premise. This article could have been the script outline. It was a good program.
The paw prints with the boys’ have been noted for years. It’s also been noted that wolves don’t go deep into caves but dogs will follow people into them.
I think it’s probable that the prints are of a dog that followed a boy.
I thought you’d be interested.
Thanks for the ping Joe. I have a Yorkshire Terrier and understand they were originally bred in England to go in holes and tiny places to kill rats.
They say never to leave a Yorkie loose around very tiny animals and my Yorkie tried to attack a Chihuahua that came into the yard recently!! I was surprised.
Yes, and the propensity of humans to nurture small cute baby animals (if they didn’t eat them). I think it’s quite likely that on occasion young wolves were found minus parents and brought back as entertainment to the hearth. At some point, some of them were useful as adults for keeping away other animals, cleaning up refuse, etc and a partnership was born. Dog society is similar to human society, so they fit well.
At least my dog says so.
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