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Humans & Dogs: Cooperation / Co-Evolution / Domestication

Ogdred Weary said:
If the owner's got Bell's Palsy then they're fucked.
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maximus otter
 
Neolithic dogs got a decent burial.

The head of a Neolithic dog has been recreated using a skull discovered in a cairn tomb in Orkney.

A forensic artist used 3D images of the 4,000-year-old animal to build the model - complete with realistic muscle, skin and hair. The animal is believed to have been the size of a large collie with features similar to a European grey wolf.The skull was one of 24 discovered when the chamber at Cuween Hill was excavated in 1901. It is believed the dogs were placed there more than 500 years after the passage tomb was built.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-shetland-47919051?ocid=socialflow_twitter&ns_campaign=bbcnews&ns_source=twitter&ns_mchannel=social

neolitdog.jpg
 
Another shaggy dog story?

Scientists are still debating when and where dogs were domesticated, but there’s one thing most of them agree on: Early canines were working animals.

Dogs evolved from gray wolves earlier than 15,000 years ago—before humans settled down in permanent villages—and they likely helped us hunt small game like deer and rabbits and pulled sleds or other transport equipment across vast plains. To buttress the idea that early dogs helped us carry supplies, archaeologists have often pointed to an aberration in the spines of many ancient canines: an overgrowth of bone known as spondylosis deformans, which researchers thought was caused by hauling heavy loads.

But a new paper debunks that idea. Reporting in PLOS ONE, Katherine Latham, a graduate student at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, finds that heavy lifting cannot be definitively linked to spondylosis deformans in dogs. The condition, however, may tell us something equally fascinating about our ancestors’ bond with canines. Latham discussed her new work with Science.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/06/diseased-spine-may-hold-clues-early-dog-human-relationship
 
Schwadevivre said:
What I was taught as a meter reader applies:
Stand 45 degrees on
Take off a cap because it can look like forward flattened, hence aggressive ears position
Confident but higher pitched voice; male voices, in particular, can sound like growling
Use don't look directly but do not drop your head
Otherwise use peripheral vision to observe (also reacts faster to movement)
Never put your hand toward an animal, instead let it sniff your hand alongside your leg
Avoid hi-vis clothing (when not working)
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This is similar to what I've heard; never approach a dog head-on, as it were, always approach sort of sideways. Apparently that's how dogs approach each other, sort of off to the side, rather than head on.

Also never pat a dog's head (unless you know the dog etc) as nervous dogs can be frightened by a large human hand covering their face; always stroke under their chin instead.

:)
 
maximus otter said:
Dogs have lived with humans for so long that they instinctively know to look at the right side of a human’s face first, as this is the side that most clearly expresses a person’s emotional state.

maximus otter
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You've been listening to psychologists. It's twaddle. Although I have (inadvertently) scared people who believe it because the right side of my face is relatively immobile and has a plastic eye.

Several times I've had psychologists tell me the things I can or can't do because no eye connected to the left side of my brain. (they cross over in psychology theory). That simply makes me prove I can do them.

I can be a bit brutal about the soft 'sciences', sorry.
 
[QUOTE="Schrodinger's Zebra, post: 1870327, member: 55559"

Also never pat a dog's head (unless you know the dog etc) as nervous dogs can be frightened by a large human hand covering their face; always stroke under their chin instead.

:)[/QUOTE]

This. Also if you are holding out a hand to be sniffed make sure it is lower than the dogs head.
 
18,000-Year-Old Puppy Found Frozen In Ice ‘Oldest Confirmed Dog’ Ever

Source: unilad.co.uk
Date: 26 November, 2019

18,000-year-old puppy discovered frozen in ice could be the ‘oldest confirmed dog’ in history.

Researchers in Sweden have shared incredible photos of the ancient canine after finding it in the Siberian permafrost in summer last year.

After studying it, they aren’t sure whether the ‘amazingly well-preserved’ creature (with a full set of teeth) is a dog or wolf – possibly because it comes from the point where dogs were domesticated.

https://www-unilad-co-uk.cdn.amppro...ound-frozen-in-ice-oldest-confirmed-dog-ever/
 
Whether it's a dog or wolf depends on how many generations of wolves of its wolf ancestors were domesticated beforehand. If it'd been found with even a rudimentary collar we'd know for sure.
 
Analyses of prehistoric canine teeth are yielding possible clues to the timeframe during which wolves began cohabitating regularly with humans.
Curious Fossil Discovery Points to Dog Domestication as Early as 28,500 Years Ago

Ancient canine craniums, discovered at a 28,500-year-old fossil site in Czechia, may represent one of the earliest stages of animal husbandry. Or, they could just be wolves.

Today, all modern dogs (Canis familiaris) are descendants of Eurasian grey wolves (C. lupus), which were likely the first animals humans domesticated.

Over millennia, a gradual series of changes is thought to have turned this wild animal into a tame docile pet, but how, why and when that process started is still fiercely debated.

In the fossil record, telling wolves apart from the first 'protodogs' is surprisingly tricky. Even today, some dogs and their wild counterparts can be hard to distinguish, so when it comes to comparing fossils of their ancestors, it can be like splitting hairs.

Or, in this case, like looking for hairline fractures on teeth.

"Dental microwear is a behavioural signal that can appear generations before morphological changes are established in a population," says anthropologist Peter Ungar from the University of Arkansas.

"It shows great promise in using the archaeological record to distinguish protodogs from wolves."

Comparing wolf-like fossils from the same site to the 'protodog' craniums, researchers found notable differences in their chompers. Unlike the Pleistocene wolf, the authors say these suspected early dog teeth had larger scars from wear and tear, indicating a diet of hard, brittle foods, like bones, as opposed to more fleshy foods, like mammoth.

"This would be consistent with the notion that canids beginning to co-habitate within or along the edges of human encampments consumed less desirable food items, including bone, discarded or fed to them by humans," the authors write.

Other modern studies certainly suggest dogs have a higher rate of tooth fracture compared to wolves, although others have disputed that correlation. ...
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FULL STORY:
https://www.sciencealert.com/this-a...f-the-earliest-examples-of-wolf-domestication

See Also:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/02/200219124229.htm
 
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Schwadevivre said:
What I was taught as a meter reader applies:
Stand 45 degrees on
Take off a cap because it can look like forward flattened, hence aggressive ears position
Confident but higher pitched voice; male voices, in particular, can sound like growling
Use don't look directly but do not drop your head
Otherwise use peripheral vision to observe (also reacts faster to movement)
Never put your hand toward an animal, instead let it sniff your hand alongside your leg
Avoid hi-vis clothing (when not working)
Click to expand...

What is about Hi-Vis? My dog hates men in hi-vis lycra and/or trainers. We live on a popular cycle and running route so there are often people in sports wear around, but it is the cyclists and runners in yellow and orange that really get him going, particularly male ones.
 
They've mushed for a long time.

A new study bolsters the idea that humans began to breed sled dogs in the Arctic more than 9500 years ago, The New York Times reports.

In 2017, scientists discovered archaeological evidence that ancient humans seemed to have bred dogs to pull sleds on the remote Siberian island of Zhokhov—making it the first evidence for any sort of dog breeding in the archaeological record. The new study, published today in Science, adds DNA evidence suggesting the dogs had already begun to evolve to adapt to the temperatures and oxygen requirements of the job. The adaptations were so successful that they still show up in today’s sled dogs in Greenland (above).

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/202...led-dogs-9500-years-ago-dna-evidence-suggests
 
ramonmercado said:
Neolithic dogs got a decent burial.

The head of a Neolithic dog has been recreated using a skull discovered in a cairn tomb in Orkney.

A forensic artist used 3D images of the 4,000-year-old animal to build the model - complete with realistic muscle, skin and hair. The animal is believed to have been the size of a large collie with features similar to a European grey wolf.The skull was one of 24 discovered when the chamber at Cuween Hill was excavated in 1901. It is believed the dogs were placed there more than 500 years after the passage tomb was built.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-shetland-47919051?ocid=socialflow_twitter&ns_campaign=bbcnews&ns_source=twitter&ns_mchannel=social

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Wow!! That's AWESOME!! :D
 
Some stuff on ancient dogs. The researcher is named Wolfgang!

Sometime toward the end of the last ice age, a gray wolf gingerly approached a human encampment. Those first tentative steps set his species on the path to a dramatic transformation:

By at least 15,000 years ago, those wolves had become dogs, and neither they nor their human companions would ever be the same. But just how this relationship evolved over the ensuing millennia has been a mystery. Now, in the most comprehensive comparison yet of ancient dog and human DNA, scientists are starting to fill in some of the blanks, revealing where dogs and humans traveled together—and where they may have parted ways.

“It’s a really cool study,” says Wolfgang Haak, an archaeogeneticist at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. “We’re finally starting to see how the dog story and the human story match up.”

Dogs are one of the biggest enigmas of domestication. Despite decades of study, scientists still haven’t figured out when or where they arose, much less how or why it happened. A 2016 study concluded that dogs may have been domesticated twice, once in Asia and once in Europe or the Near East, but critics said there wasn’t enough evidence to be sure. A few years later, researchers reported signs of dogs in the Americas as early as 10,000 years ago, yet those canines appear to have vanished without a genetic trace. Other studies have found evidence of ancient dogs in Siberia and elsewhere, but scientists don’t know how they got there or how they’re related. ...

Sometime toward the end of the last ice age, a gray wolf gingerly approached a human encampment. Those first tentative steps set his species on the path to a dramatic transformation: By at least 15,000 years ago, those wolves had become dogs, and neither they nor their human companions would ever be the same. But just how this relationship evolved over the ensuing millennia has been a mystery. Now, in the most comprehensive comparison yet of ancient dog and human DNA, scientists are starting to fill in some of the blanks, revealing where dogs and humans traveled together—and where they may have parted ways.

“It’s a really cool study,” says Wolfgang Haak, an archaeogeneticist at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. “We’re finally starting to see how the dog story and the human story match up.”

Dogs are one of the biggest enigmas of domestication. Despite decades of study, scientists still haven’t figured out when or where they arose, much less how or why it happened. A 2016 study concluded that dogs may have been domesticated twice, once in Asia and once in Europe or the Near East, but critics said there wasn’t enough evidence to be sure. A few years later, researchers reported signs of dogs in the Americas as early as 10,000 years ago, yet those canines appear to have vanished without a genetic trace. Other studies have found evidence of ancient dogs in Siberia and elsewhere, but scientists don’t know how they got there or how they’re related.

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/10/how-dogs-tracked-their-humans-across-ancient-world
 
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Here are the bibliographic details and abstract for the research report Ramon cited above. The full article is accessible at the link below.

Origins and genetic legacy of prehistoric dogs
Anders Bergström, Laurent Frantz, Ryan Schmidt, Erik Ersmark, Ophelie Lebrasseur, Linus Girdland-Flink, et al.
Science 30 Oct 2020:
Vol. 370, Issue 6516, pp. 557-564

DOI: 10.1126/science.aba9572

Abstract
Dogs were the first domestic animal, but little is known about their population history and to what extent it was linked to humans. We sequenced 27 ancient dog genomes and found that all dogs share a common ancestry distinct from present-day wolves, with limited gene flow from wolves since domestication but substantial dog-to-wolf gene flow. By 11,000 years ago, at least five major ancestry lineages had diversified, demonstrating a deep genetic history of dogs during the Paleolithic. Coanalysis with human genomes reveals aspects of dog population history that mirror humans, including Levant-related ancestry in Africa and early agricultural Europe. Other aspects differ, including the impacts of steppe pastoralist expansions in West and East Eurasia and a near-complete turnover of Neolithic European dog ancestry.

FULL ARTICLE:
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/370/6516/557.full
 
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