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A New Origin Story for Dogs
- tex0 10y agoLook out. That page always Redirects me to a Malware page after a few seconds.
- duggan 10y agoProblem may be on your end, or between you and The Atlantic. I've noticed no such issue, and VirusTotal gives it an all clear.[0] [0]: https://www.virustotal.com/en/url/1baee95371f0f447bbdc2baa53246dabe183deed0ae0ec70ae4361a8a313dd52/analysis/1465281705/ https://www.virustotal.com/en/url/1baee95371f0f447bbdc2baa53...
- sigill 10y ago> But after decades of dogged effort, he and his fellow scientists are still arguing about the answers. > Other canine genetics experts think that Larson’s barking up the wrong tree. > Of all the problems that scientists struggle with, why has the origin of dogs been such a bitch to solve? It seems like the author was in some sort of pun writing competition.
- carlob 10y agoYou missed hounded
- golergka 10y agoAlso, doggy style.
- kazinator 10y agoIf you own such an author, please keep him muzzled and leashed, and scoop up those puns. I have a patch for the article: @@ -1234,5 +1234,7 @@ Larson, who is fast-talking, eminently likable, +playful, loyal, up-to-date with all his shots, +certified free of fleas and ticks, and grounded in both archaeology and genetics, -has been gathering fossils and collaborators +has been retrieving fossils and collaborators in an attempt to yank the DNA out of as many dog and wolf fossils as he can.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- mercer 10y agoA bunch of my friends are journalist and they all constantly challenge each other to try and get particular words, sentences, or references published. While they might be an exception (they're all friends with each other), I wouldn't be surprised if this is very common. Their version of easter eggs, I suppose.
- owyn 10y agoThis story has the vibe of a TED talk, it's got scientists with different opinions, a grand scope and scale of tens of thousands of years, plus dogs, which we all love. I really do think humans were doing interesting things tens of thousands of years ago. Some of it was written down, and some of it only survives through oral traditions but the ideas and actions of those people in that era still impact us today. Some of those things are animals like the cat that is trying to sit on my laptop right now.
- trentmb 10y ago> like the cat that is trying to sit on my laptop right now Or the Pitt that informed me it's bed time by sitting on my head :P
- aaron695 10y ago> oral traditions People can't even be orally consistent over 100 years. There's no such thing as oral traditions that are anything more than 100's of years old. We can watch fiction stories that were written down evolve at the 100 year speed.
- agumonkey 10y agoI like to take in account the distortion as a meaningful information. It says things about what people perceived and desired somehow.
- hugh4 10y agoIf you like, but it doesn't tell us anything about what was happening ten thousand years ago, just what has happened in the meantime.
- a_bonobo 10y agoThere are some cool overlaps between Australian aboriginal oral traditions and past events: https://theconversation.com/finding-meteorite-impacts-in-aboriginal-oral-tradition-38052 https://theconversation.com/finding-meteorite-impacts-in-abo...
- sandworm101 10y agoBefore getting to the domestication question, I think they need to figure out exactly what they mean by 'wolf'. The lines are blurry. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coywolf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coywolf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coydog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coydog
- restalis 10y agoIf they can be crossbreed then the consideration of dogs, wolves, coyotes, and others representing a distinct species. Could they be just subspecies?
- hrvbr 10y agoSame story from the CNRS: https://news.cnrs.fr/articles/rethinking-the-origin-of-dogs https://news.cnrs.fr/articles/rethinking-the-origin-of-dogs
- pluma 10y agoI thought the common wisdom (not saying it's correct) was that dogs had been domesticated several times (not just twice) and most modern dog breeds are derived from a mix of different (but closely related) animals?
- vonmoltke 10y agoI can't keep track of the "common wisdom" on dogs at this point. It seems to change constantly, for reasons well-articulated in the article.
- PunchTornado 10y agoI don't think you can say "before mathematics" like you say before internet, art etc.
- rs999gti 10y agoIt's like "before time" technically time, like math, always existed, humans just quantified it.
- tonmoy 10y agoTime may not have always existed though.
- adrianratnapala 10y agoIf anything mathematics quantified humans rather than the other way around. That being kinda the spirit of the game. Humans have been figuring out logically necessary consequences ever since they deserved the name human -- and thus doing maths. In this tradition, people like the Babylonians got useful, nontrivial, interesting mathematical results. But I think "real maths" means proving things up to a dogmatically persnickety, seemingly insane, standard of rationality. And that seems to have begun with the Pythagoreans in Greece, about 2600 years ago.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- restalis 10y agoI always wondered how come the first animal to be domesticated happened to be a predator? Sheep and goats seems much easier to control around and call it as domestication. I guess it had something to do with the way humans lived at that time, 30-40'000 years ago. I imagine that as hunters, they were more inclined to accept hunting helpers than to try herding herbivores.
- CapitalistCartr 10y agoHerbivores flee us. Other predators will show us a respectful distance, but are much less fearful. So we can start an informal relationship with a few wolves or such by throwing them a bit of meat from a big kill. I'd much rather tame a carnivore; it'd be vastly easier. And taming is the forerunner to domestication.