Comments on: How Dogs Won The World https://gregladen.com/blog/2015/11/13/how-dogs-won-the-world/ Fri, 11 Aug 2017 13:20:19 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.6 By: D F COLLINSON https://gregladen.com/blog/2015/11/13/how-dogs-won-the-world/#comment-473661 Fri, 11 Aug 2017 13:20:19 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/?p=21793#comment-473661 It is my no means clear that modern humans had domesticated the dog before Neanderthals were extinct or virtually extinct.

]]> By: Joe https://gregladen.com/blog/2015/11/13/how-dogs-won-the-world/#comment-473660 Thu, 04 Aug 2016 17:07:55 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/?p=21793#comment-473660 Fascinating post, but I would think it is just an assumption that neanderthals didn’t have dogs. The first possible dog is 32k old from Altai, and Hss is not known to live there at the time, though Neanderthal and Denisovan were. Dogs apparently lived in caves with Homo Erectus in China over a hundred thousand years ago, and monkeys have been folmed “domesticating” puppies and indoctrinating them into their clans.

]]> By: Ugo Bardi https://gregladen.com/blog/2015/11/13/how-dogs-won-the-world/#comment-473659 Sat, 14 Nov 2015 17:12:14 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/?p=21793#comment-473659 Every year, I make an introductory lesson on evolutionary biology to my students in physical chemistry. The focus is “what makes humans peculiar animals”. And there are lots of features that are peculiar to humans; a very curious species. The whites of our eyes are a nice addition to the list, Others are the prorturing chin, the large number of sweating glands, the lack of a baculum in males, and more. Most are easily explainable in terms of evolutionary biology, some are rather hard: why did we (males) lose our penile bone? There are explanations, but none really convincing

]]> By: Digital Rabbit https://gregladen.com/blog/2015/11/13/how-dogs-won-the-world/#comment-473658 Sat, 14 Nov 2015 15:56:04 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/?p=21793#comment-473658 Looks interesting! Thanks for sharing.

]]> By: Greg Laden https://gregladen.com/blog/2015/11/13/how-dogs-won-the-world/#comment-473657 Sat, 14 Nov 2015 04:36:14 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/?p=21793#comment-473657 Thadd, good questions. Shipman’s idea does not rely on the quirk that the unique human trait (the whites of our eyes) emerged in humans and not neanderthals, but it is what she suggests as a possibility.

Neanderthals may not have simply been just like humans. Whether we think they were or not is more a matter of fad at this point, though I think no one sees them as senseless brutes any more.

Humans have a collection of traits. There is no clear way to know which needed to co-evolve. Hard to say which unique human traits they may have not had, and visa versa.

i don’t have a problem with the dating of dog domestication. It has to be early and widespread if all foragers colonized all lands with them. (If that happened). The archaeological dates do not really inform us. Read Shipman’s arguments on that.

]]> By: Greg Laden https://gregladen.com/blog/2015/11/13/how-dogs-won-the-world/#comment-473656 Sat, 14 Nov 2015 04:28:18 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/?p=21793#comment-473656 Magma, you might be on to something.

]]> By: David Kirtley https://gregladen.com/blog/2015/11/13/how-dogs-won-the-world/#comment-473655 Sat, 14 Nov 2015 03:15:12 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/?p=21793#comment-473655 Added to my “to be read” list. Thanks, Greg.

What about cats?

]]> By: Thadd https://gregladen.com/blog/2015/11/13/how-dogs-won-the-world/#comment-473654 Sat, 14 Nov 2015 02:27:26 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/?p=21793#comment-473654 Two big questions here
A) why the assumption that Neanderthals could not communicate with their gaze? These were tool users, teachers, hunters. People who sat arround fires and had complex social interactions. More importantly, they were capable of socializing with humans. If gaze is key to humans, this suggests Neanderthals shared the ability to communicate and facilitate mating.
2) you need to accept an extremely early date for dog domestication to reach this conclusion. Archaeological evidence points to a date c. 15k bp. While genetic evidence may point to domestication just at the time of human neanderthal interaction, it would have been relatively uncommon and very tentative interaction between humans and wolves.

]]> By: Brainstorms https://gregladen.com/blog/2015/11/13/how-dogs-won-the-world/#comment-473653 Sat, 14 Nov 2015 02:21:31 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/?p=21793#comment-473653 Magma: Good one!

]]> By: Magma https://gregladen.com/blog/2015/11/13/how-dogs-won-the-world/#comment-473652 Sat, 14 Nov 2015 01:35:36 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/?p=21793#comment-473652 The Neanderthals died out because they tried to domesticate the wrong species. So while H. sapiens was forging his productive relationship with wolves, H. neanderthalensis was engaged in a static staring contest with lynxes that alternated between “what?” and “so bored now”.

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