Gravettians And Their Dogs

There's an article in Science Daily about a site in the Czech Republic where scientists have found evidence of Gravettian people hunting mammoths about 30,000 years ago. To me, the most interesting thing about the find was the conclusion that the hunters used domesticated dogs, which I think would move the date for the domestication of dogs back much further than is suggested by the genetics of modern dogs. The story can be found here.

www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/11/141124074841.htm

It sounds like mammoths were very delicious. People ate mammoths but fed dogs with deer meat.

LeBrok said:

It sounds like mammoths were very delicious. People ate mammoths but fed dogs with deer meat.

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Are you thinking we should use DNA to try to recreate the species, so we could buy mammoth steaks at the butcher's shop? I think you'd have trouble with the animal rights activists over that idea. Although, since the mammoths would want to be in the arctic, some animal rights activists might think it was okay for Inuit to hunt the mammoths as long as they used only the traditional mammoth hunting techniques of the Siberian mammoth hunters. So we might have to also use DNA to recreate Mal'ta Boy and his clan, so they could teach the Inuit the right way to hunt mammoths.

Aberdeen said:

There's an article in Science Daily about a site in the Czech Republic where scientists have found evidence of Gravettian people hunting mammoths about 30,000 years ago. To me, the most interesting thing about the find was the conclusion that the hunters used domesticated dogs, which I think would move the date for the domestication of dogs back much further than is suggested by the genetics of modern dogs. The story can be found here.

www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/11/141124074841.htm

Click to expand...

I was reminded of your post when I read this about the sequencing of the cat genome:
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/11/05/1410083111.abstract

Razib Khan, who has posted pictures of himself with his cat, is listed as one of the authors, and he published a piece in The New York Times about it:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/25/opinion/our-cats-ourselves.html?_r=0

Basically, cats are only partly domesticated, and that's because they haven't been domesticated for as long. Any cat owner would know that, of course. Whenever I watch one of those apocalypse movies or television series, they show dogs scavenging around human settlements. They should also show cats perfectly happy hunting in the wild. It hasn't been bred out of them. My mother's tom cat, fat and happy from all her food still hunted because she allowed him to go outdoors. He would proudly kill birds or mice and then bring them to the back door to show her. He didn't eat them, though. He preferred her cooking. Who says they aren't smart?

I hasten to add that I like dogs very much, and have usually had one. However, I have a great deal of respect for cats, as well as admiring their elegant beauty and grace. I rather like the fact that they are so self-sufficient, and that they don't exhibit so much of the fawning behavior that is so typical of dogs. Plus, they're clean, and you don't have to feel guilty when you leave them for the day. :grin: Now that I'm released from the incessant, hourly demands of young children, I am resisting burdening myself with the demands of a dog, much as I love them.

Dogs are definitely like children that never grow up. And sometimes easier to love, since most dogs never learn to be defiant in the way toddlers can be. But there is nothing sadder than feral dogs - dogs are no longer able to survive without us. That's why I would find it easy to imagine that dogs have been living with humans for hundreds of thousands of years. But I keep reading info about how dogs are mainly descended from wolves from the Middle East that were only domesticated about 10,000 years ago. That suggest that the type of dogs Gravettians used for mammoth hunting didn't survive. However, it's easy to imagine people domesticating dogs multiple times. I once saw a nature documentary about baboons stealing wild dog pups and raising them to act as sentries for the baboons.