yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Dogs: (Prehistoric) Man's Best Friend | National Geographic


2m read
·Nov 11, 2024

There are more dog burials in prehistory than there are burials of any other animals, including cats, for example, or horses. Dogs seem to have a very special place in human communities in the past. As soon as we see in the archaeological record skeletal remains that look like a modern dog, we see dogs being buried. I mean, 14,000 years ago we see the first dog burials appear.

I started about 12 or 13 years ago doing archaeology in Siberia around Lake Baikal as part of a long-standing archaeological project that's centered here at the University of Alberta. The dogs were being treated just like people when they died. They were being carefully placed in a grave. Some of them are wearing necklaces when they're buried; some they play spoons and other offerings in the grave with the dog, with the idea, I think, being essentially for some of them that they had souls. They had an afterlife, and people loved them, so they treated them like human persons when they passed away.

One of the things we're doing here in this laboratory is we're studying the diets of dogs in the past. We do this by looking at chemical components of the bone. The big question in dog domestication research has been where and when did dogs emerge from wolves. But I don't think it really tells us very much. I'm more interested in what can we learn about people's relationships with dogs in the past and learn more about our own relationships with dogs.

What was its life like? And that's more interesting to me. Was it accompanying people in hunting? Was it carrying packs? Was it loved or was it abused? These are interesting questions, I think, more interesting than just when.

More Articles

View All
Jungle Search | Explorer
In 2012, they are finally ready to start looking. We went down to Honduras and we brought down a plane with this million dollar gear in it and the crew. Every morning we get up, go to the airport, get in the airplane. I didn’t go in the plane; there was o…
Teleportation: Tearing the Fabric of Spacetime
The date is October 23rd, 1593. The governor of the Philippines had just been assassinated a few days after setting off on our journey from Manila. His ship and crew were overthrown by Chinese pirates on board. When the news of his assassination reached t…
The Next Generation's Champion of Chimps | Podcast | Overheard at National Geographic
So it’s just two of us, and then there were the marijuana growers who had automatic weapons with them. We stumbled upon them in the forest, and they saw us too. This is the hot, humid forest of southwestern Nigeria. It’s a tropical jungle teeming with lif…
IKIGAI | A Japanese Philosophy for Finding Purpose
Have you ever asked yourself this question: what is my purpose? With so many opportunities that life has to offer, and all these different jobs and careers, it’s quite difficult to decide what we want to do with our lives. Society demands us to make decis…
The Man of a Trillion Worlds | Cosmos: Possible Worlds
NARRATOR: Harold Uris was a chemist. Like Gerard Kuiper, he also had to fight his way into science. Uris’ family was poor, like Kuiper’s, so he took a job teaching grammar school in a mining camp in Montana. The parents of one of his students urged him to…
Billionaire John Paulson Warns Bitcoin is Going to $0 | Buy This Instead
What about cryptocurrencies? Are you a believer in cryptocurrencies? No, I’m not a believer in cryptocurrencies, and I would say that cryptocurrencies are a bubble. Billionaire hedge fund manager John Paulson said in a recent interview that Bitcoin is go…