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This is not true. We literally discovered a 32,000 year old burial site where a hunter put a mammoth bone in their deceased dogs mouth when they buried him. h

This is not true. We literally discovered a 32,000 year old burial site where a hunter put a mammoth bone in their deceased dogs mouth when they buried him. https://www.boehringer-ingelheim.com/animal-health/our-responsibility/human-dog-relationship-historical-perspective https://www.boehringer-ingelheim.com/animal-health/our-respo... That's not utilitarian, to give funerary care. Another grave site in Germany from 14,000 years ago had a dog buried with a man and a woman, treating it as a family member. We literally have had fur babies since before we had civilization. Once you get there, there's far more evidence: ancient Greeks burying pets and writing inscriptions about how they loved them, dogs and baboons were kept as pets in ancient Egypt, and given names, which was a big deal in Egyptian religion, and wasn't done for utility animals at all.

epgui 2y ago
Yes, and in the evolutionary time scale of primates, that’s all very recent.
- ang_cire 2y ago
  Now you're backtracking. Those other primates weren't humans. In human history, pets are not recent by any measure. We have no evidence of a specific period of homo sapiens in which we know they did not keep pets. Also, other animals have been observed keeping pets.
  - epgui 2y ago
    I'm not backtracking, you're simply not operating within the proper context boundary, or perhaps getting hung up on the least important[0] semantic imprecision in the thread[1]; regardless of whether we're talking about "human" or "primate" evolution (of the kind that is relevant to this discussion), it simply does not happen at these time scales. We're talking about evolution of highly conserved behavioural traits, not about "the History of homo sapiens sapiens" stricto sensu. [0] It's the least important imprecision because in general, when we talk about the evolution of a species, we typically also consider common ancestors that don't necessarily have the same label as the modern species. When we speak of "human evolution", we're referring to proto-humans and human-primate common ancestors as well. Anyone would gloss over this in context. [1] Note also that the imprecision was someone else's, not mine.

epgui 2y ago

Yes, and in the evolutionary time scale of primates, that’s all very recent.

ang_cire 2y ago
Now you're backtracking. Those other primates weren't humans. In human history, pets are not recent by any measure. We have no evidence of a specific period of homo sapiens in which we know they did not keep pets. Also, other animals have been observed keeping pets.
- epgui 2y ago
  I'm not backtracking, you're simply not operating within the proper context boundary, or perhaps getting hung up on the least important[0] semantic imprecision in the thread[1]; regardless of whether we're talking about "human" or "primate" evolution (of the kind that is relevant to this discussion), it simply does not happen at these time scales. We're talking about evolution of highly conserved behavioural traits, not about "the History of homo sapiens sapiens" stricto sensu. [0] It's the least important imprecision because in general, when we talk about the evolution of a species, we typically also consider common ancestors that don't necessarily have the same label as the modern species. When we speak of "human evolution", we're referring to proto-humans and human-primate common ancestors as well. Anyone would gloss over this in context. [1] Note also that the imprecision was someone else's, not mine.