Sunday, June 4, 2017

You Say You Love Dogs ... But for How Far Back #Science

Researchers have found the oldest evidence for dog breeding on a remote island in the East Siberian Sea. Nine thousand years ago, the hunter-gatherers of Zhokhov Island lived in animal-skin tents, hunted large numbers of polar bears with nothing more than a spear, and appear to have been the first people on Earth who bred dogs for a specific purpose—in this case to pull sleds, so that they could track reindeer across hundreds of miles of frozen plains. The work could rewrite the thinking about some of the earliest days of dog domestication, and it suggests that scientists interested in the beginnings of the human-canine relationship should be paying more attention to early Arctic peoples.

- Science:  Siberia yields earliest evidence for dog breeding

The interested student is advised the above is only the summary and you're invited to review the fullness of it in the source article.

Note:  of all the science references Ithaka uses, Science is the most scientifically technical in terms of adherence to academic structure of presentation, etc.  You won't find the easiest reading but it often goes the deepest.


Maybe you want to get provincial and think, man, there were Americans around at that time so maybe they did it first and maybe they did since the first ones weren't so far removed from the ones in eastern Siberia ... in fact, they had been the ones in eastern Siberia.

Note:  the regards as Americans everyone back to the first who set foot on the continent since all of us are immigrants or born to immigrants.


Those millennials love to take things to next levels so here's one.  When sled dogs permitted those people to travel hundreds of miles, which people do you suppose were the ones who actually did emigrate to America.

Watson:  you might want to sync this with the actual closing of the Bering Straight for the land bridge.

We don't need to sync that, Watson, since humans already did.

Riddle me this, said the Pie Man,
as he walked with his dogs,
"What if they already knew
much earlier than science has found
since maybe they don't know it yet
when that's deeper in the ground"

- the Colonel

Watson:  maybe they used reindeer as pack animals and came across that way.

Well, I tell you what, Reindeer Man ... if you have a reindeer to carry your stuff or you have some dogs, which do you think will be your best choice for going over questionable ice.

Tip:  there are no reindeer in Alaska.


Here's the Rockhouse Hare-Brained Theory since it seems logical the first ones to try to cross the Straight successfully were probably using dogs while those who were using reindeer came in later waves.  Maybe the reindeer were a prehistoric version of "Wagon Train" which never made a trail but which was happy to follow one.

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