The origins of a dog

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If you were to compare our ancestors from that long ago to modern humans you’d also likely conclude we had become on average more fragile and neurotic too. Most people certainly aren’t self sufficient hunter gatherers battling elements and mammoths and such with sticks and rocks.

Also... as a fun fact...

Speaking of battling mammoths and such. Some theories hold that humans actually learned many of the things that anthropologists feel were the foundations of modern society... from dogs! These theories hold that through watching dogs and working with dogs we were able to imitate them and learn how to hunt in “packs” as teams- allowing us to hunt larger prey more effectively and thus have more food, which allowed us to grow. They believe the territorial nature of wild packs allowed us to learn basic ideas like “protecting our territory” through patrols and markers. They even say that dogs making dens helped us learn to make shelter so we didn’t have to rely on natural shelter like caves.

Such theories see dogs as guiding our early social and technological evolution as we learned from them. The oldest known human writing is about 5,000 years ago. Currently the oldest pictographic example of figurative story telling is believed to be about 44,000 years old. The time tables for our development are theoretically in line to make this theory possible. I think it’s interesting, and it would be pretty neat if old dogs taught our ancestors how to do tricks!