"Despite the documented evidence of chess historian H.J.R. Murray, I have always thought that chess was invented by a goddess."
George Koltanowski, from Women in Chess, Players of the Modern Game
The information I found most striking in this article is that the Aztecs viewed dogs as "soul guides" -- much like beliefs in the ancient Middle East. I don't know enough about the culture to say -- I'm wondering now if dogs were closely associated with one or more Aztec goddesses. In the ancient Middle East, some board game pieces were canines and dogs. I do not think it is a coincidence. Dogs (canines) were chosen as game pieces for specific reasons, even if in later ages players did not recognize either the significance or the symbolism involved.
Archaeologists on Friday announced the discovery of "an exceptional" old burial site under an apartment building in Mexico City containing the remains of 12 dogs, animals that had a major religious and symbolic significance to the Aztec peoples of central Mexico.
Previously, the remains of dogs have been found accompanying human remains or as part of offerings, experts with Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History, or INAH, said in a statement. But this is the first time a group of dogs has been found buried together at one site.
"This is definitely a special finding because of the number of dogs and because we have found no connection to a building or with the deceased," said archaeologist Rocio Morales Sanchez.
Aztecs believed dogs could guide human souls into a new life after death on earth, and could guard pyramids and other monuments when buried under them.
The dogs were buried at around the same time in a small pit between 1350 a 1520 A.D., the heyday of the Aztec empire. The team of archaeologists determined when the dogs were buried through ceramics and other items found in nearby pits under the apartment building in the populous Mexico City borough of Aztacapozalco, Sanchez Morales said.
Michael E. Smith, an anthropology professor at Arizona State University who was not involved in the project, said the discovery is important because it is the first such find. "This is not the first time a burial of a dog has been found, but it is the first find where many dogs were carefully buried together, in a setting that is like a cemetery," Smith said.
Morales Sanchez said they will need to dig deeper to see if there are other items that could help them find out why the animals were buried in that area.
Smith said it will be important to see the results of the analysis of the bones. "That work will tell us about the breed of these dogs, and it may tell us how they were killed," he said. "The full significance of the finds is rarely obvious at time of excavation; the analysis will give the full story."
Archaeologist Antonio Zamora, who works at the excavation site, said a biologist told the team the remains belonged to medium-sized dogs with full sets of teeth, likely common dogs.
Aztecs kept pets Techichi dogs, a breed with short legs believed to be an ancestor of the Chihuahua dog, and Xoloitzcuintlis (shoh-loh-eets-KWEEN'-tlees), whose remains can be identified because of the loss of some of their teeth during adult age.
Archaeologists have found some of the most curious canine burials ever unearthed in Egypt — two well preserved dogs buried in pots some 3,000 years ago.
Nicknamed Houdini and Chewie, the dog pots were discovered at Shunet ez Zebib, a large mud-brick structure located at Abydos — one of Egypt’s oldest standing royal monuments. The site was built around 2750 B.C and was dedicated to Khasekhemwy, a second dynasty king.
It is also known for the the thousands of ibis burials in jars that had been recovered in the dunes nearby, and for the interments of other animals, mostly raptors and canines.
“The site provided a very secure structure, with conveniently soft, sandy fill that was easy for quick burials within a sacred space,” Salima Ikram, professor of Egyptology at The American University in Cairo, wrote in a recently published Festschrift in honor of Dieter Kessler, a renowned scholar in the field of animal cults and Egyptian religion.
A leading expert on animal mummies, Ikram analyzed the results of a 2009 excavation led by David O’Connor and Matthew Adams, respectively director and field director of the North Abydos Project at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Digging in the Shunet ez-Zebib’s southeast corner, the archaeologists unearthed several jars containing animal burials.
“Of the many jars that were recovered, only 13 have thus far been properly investigated. Of these, four were empty, three contained ibises, and five were filled with dogs,” Ikram said.
While three pots contained skeletonized remains of dogs, the last two housed Houdini and Chewie, two animals with their fur largely intact.
“Although it is common to find birds in pots, it is rare to find other animals buried in this way,” Ikram told Discovery News.
In particular, no canine burials in pots have been recorded in the many dog cemeteries scattered throughout Egypt.
“These jars were probably made and used for some sort of storage, and then re-used as coffins for the dogs. They are quite charming as the dogs are curled up in the pots,” Ikra said.
Houdini was found in a large two-handled pot, and was buried without any wrappings.
Archaeologists have found some of the most curious canine burials ever unearthed in Egypt -- two well preserved dogs buried in pots some 3000 years ago.
Photo with kind permission of the NYU-IFA mission to Abydos
“We could not figure out how such a large animal was fit into the pot, so we named him after the magician, Houdini,” Ikram said.
The animal’s fur was brown to auburn-coppery, with portions darker and stiffer, as if they had been anointed by some substance such as oil or even resin.
“It seems as if he were put into the pot, hind limbs first, then adjusted and the rest of the body pushed in so that he was curled around,” Ikram said.
Although it is likely that Houdini is a dog, certain identification of the species is impossible as the animal could not be removed from the jar without compromising its integrity.
“The color of his almost auburn fur is unusual in a dog, as is the length of the hairs, which tend to be shorter in Egyptian dogs than the 3.5 inches found in the case of Houdini,” Ikram said.
“The only other viable identification would be a fox, but the fur’s color is not in keeping with the foxes found in Egypt today,” she added.
Not as well preserved as Houdini, Chewie was found in a large jar filled with the broken pieces of another large pot, which was used as a packing material to keep the dog in situ.
“Once the broken bits of pottery were removed, the dog contained within the pot was completely visible,” Ikram said.
The lack of evidence of any textile in the jar suggests Chewie was buried without bandages.
“The bones from his right foreleg were pushing through the skin and yellow fur,” Ikram added.
According to the researcher, both animals were mature, probably around five years of age.
“They were probably votive offerings unless they held the position of sacred animals — perhaps the pot burials are indicative of their being Sacred rather than just Votive,”Ikram said.
How the two animals were pushed into pots from which they cannot be extracted now remains a mystery.
“Without further examination and chemical testing it is not possible to understand the process by which these two animals were preserved,” Ikram said.
Among the possible embalming scenarios, the most likely treatment would include evisceration, dessication and defatting with natron salt.
Oiled and resined, the animals were then pushed into the jars.
“Sealed and buried in layers of protective sand, and cocooned in their jars, the animals’ bodies were well preserved so that they could serve as vehicles for their spirits, or kas, for eternity,” Ikram said.
More or less simultaneous "domestication" of canines can well have happened in many different part of the world. However our current canine companions cam to be, I am so happy they did. I have had the most amazing relationships with my doggies, and I still mourn the passing of each and every one over these forty plus years. They were the most faithful, unjudgmental and loyal companions, and they loved me no matter what. Dogs can teach us much about being decent "people."
Dog saves new owner from house fire Posted on: 8:44 pm, November 15, 2013, by Joe Borlik, updated on: 08:45pm, November 15, 2013(Florida dog wakes woman who rescued him from dog shelter less than two weeks earlier)
NEW YORK (AP) — For years, scientists have been dogged by this evolution question: Just where did man's best friend first appear?
The earliest known doglike fossils come from Europe. But DNA studies have implicated east Asia and the Middle East. Now a large DNA study is lining up with the fossils, suggesting dogs originated in Europe some 19,000 to 32,000 years ago.
Experts praised the new work but said it won't end the debate.
Scientists generally agree that dogs emerged from wolves to become the first domesticated animal. Their wolf ancestors began to associate with people, maybe drawn by food in garbage dumps and carcasses left by human hunters. In the process they became tamer, and scientists believe people found them useful for things like hunting and guard duty. Over a very long time in this human environment, wolves gradually turned into the first dogs.
The latest attempt to figure out where this happened was published online Thursday by the journal Science.
Researchers gathered DNA from fossils of 18 ancient wolflike and doglike creatures that lived up to 36,000 years ago in Argentina, Belgium, Germany, Russia, Switzerland and the United States. They compared the genetic material to modern samples from 49 wolves from North America, Asia, Europe and the Middle East, 77 dogs of a wide variety of breeds including cocker spaniel, basenji and golden retriever, and four coyotes.
The DNA of modern dogs showed similarities to the genetic material from the ancient European specimens and modern-day European wolves, the researchers reported.
The first dogs evolved by associating with hunter-gatherers rather than farmers, since dogs evidently appeared before agriculture did, they said.
"There are now, based on genetic evidence, three alternative hypotheses for the origin of dogs," said Robert Wayne of the University of California, Los Angeles, a study author.
He said his results suggest a better case for Europe than for east Asia or the Middle East. He also said the kind of wolf that gave rise to dogs is now extinct.
Olaf Thalmann of the University of Turku in Finland, another author, said the work doesn't mean that Europe is the only place where dogs emerged.
"We conclude that Europe played a major role in the domestication process," he said in an email.
The work makes a strong argument for an origin in Europe, although it might not be the only place, said Greger Larson of Durham University in England, who did not participate in the research. "I think it's a real step in the right direction."
Once thought to have been extinct, native American dogs are on the contrary thriving, according to a recent study that links these breeds to ancient Asia.
The arrival of Europeans in the Americas has generally been assumed to have led to the extinction of indigenous dog breeds; but a comprehensive genetic study has found that the original population of native American dogs has been almost completely preserved, says Peter Savolainen, a researcher in evolutionary genetics at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.
In fact, American dog breeds trace their ancestry to ancient Asia, Savolainen says. These native breeds have 30 percent or less modern replacement by European dogs, he says.
“Our results confirm that American dogs are a remaining part of the indigenous American culture, which underscores the importance of preserving these populations,” he says.
Savolainen's research group, in cooperation with colleagues in Portugal, compared mitochondrial DNA from Asian and European dogs, ancient American archaeological samples, and American dog breeds, including Chihuahuas, Peruvian hairless dogs and Arctic sled dogs. They traced the American dogs’ ancestry back to East Asian and Siberian dogs, and also found direct relations between ancient American dogs and modern breeds.
“It was especially exciting to find that the Mexican breed, Chihuahua, shared a DNA type uniquely with Mexican pre-Columbian samples,” he says. “This gives conclusive evidence for the Mexican ancestry of the Chihuahua.”
The team also analysed stray dogs, confirming them generally to be runaway European dogs; but in Mexico and Bolivia they identified populations with high proportions of indigenous ancestry.
Savolainen says that the data also suggests that the Carolina Dog, a stray dog population in the U.S., may have an indigenous American origin.
Savolainen works at the Science for Life Laboratory (SciLifeLab www.scilifelab.se), a collaboration involving KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm University, the Karolinska Institutet and Uppsala University.
An analysis of ancient dog burials finds that the typical prehistoric dog owner ate a lot of seafood, had spiritual beliefs, and wore jewelry that sometimes wound up on the dog.
The first domestication of dogs might have taken place 31,700 years ago. “The most remarkable difference between these dogs and recent dog breeds is the size of the teeth,” paleontologist Mietje Germonpré said. This particular specimen was found with a still-visible mammoth bone in its mouth.
Mietje Germonpré [Someone took the time and loving care to put a bone in this doggy's mouth to accompany it to - wherever they thought it might be going...]
The study, published in PLoS ONE, is one of the first to directly test if there was a clear relationship between the practice of dog burial and human behaviors. The answer is yes.
"Dog burials appear to be more common in areas where diets were rich in aquatic foods because these same areas also appear to have had the densest human populations and the most cemeteries," lead author Robert Losey, a University of Alberta anthropologist, told Discovery News.
The discovery negates speculation that dogs back in the day were just work animals brought along on hunting trips.
"If the practice of burying dogs was solely related to their importance in procuring terrestrial game, we would expect to see them in the Early Holocene (around 9,000 years ago), when human subsistence practices were focused on these animals," Losey continued. "Further, we would expect to see them in later periods in areas where fish were never really major components of the diet and deer were the primary focus, but they are rare or absent in these regions."
For the study, Losey and his team researched dog burials worldwide, but focused particularly on ones located in Eastern Siberia. Siberia appears to have been an ancient hotbed of dog lovers, with the earliest known domesticated dog found there and dating to 33,000 years ago. Dog burials in this region, however, span across a more recent 10,000-year period.
The researchers found that most of the dog burials in this area occurred during the Early Neolithic 7,000-8,000 years ago. Dogs were only buried when human hunter-gatherers were also being buried. When pastoralists later came through, they did not bury dogs, although they did sacrifice them from time to time.
"I think the hunter-gatherers here saw some of their dogs as being nearly the same as themselves, even at a spiritual level," Losey said. "At this time, dogs were the only animals living closely with humans, and they were likely known at an individual level, far more so than any other animal people encountered. People came to know them as unique, special individuals."
The burials reflect that association. One dog, for example, was laid to rest "much like it is sleeping." A man was buried with two dogs, one carefully placed to the left of his body, and the other to the right. A dog was buried with a round pebble, possibly a toy or meaningful symbol, placed in its mouth. Still other dogs were buried with ornaments and implements, such as spoons and stone knives.
One of the most interesting burials contains a dog wearing a necklace made out of four red deer tooth pendants. Such necklaces appear to have been a fashion and/or symbolic trend at the time, since people wore them too.
"The dog buried wearing the necklace was buried in a region where human diets were relatively rich in riverine fish," Losey said. "The dog, however, was consuming relatively little fish, having a protein diet with more emphasis on terrestrial game. This suggests the dog was likely a recent arrival in the region, and its body chemistry had not yet adjusted to the local fish diet."
All of the hunter-gatherer dogs were similar in appearance to large varieties of huskies, similar to today’s Siberian huskies.
Erik Axelsson, a researcher at Uppsala University’s Science for Life Laboratory, has also studied prehistoric dogs. He too found that human and dog diets, burial practices and more often paralleled each other, revealing how close the dog-human bond has been for thousands of years.
Axelsson said, "Dogs and humans share the same environment, we eat similar food and we get similar diseases."
Based on the number of burials, we also often spend eternity together too. [I sure hope so. I miss my doggies so much -- all of them, going back to childhood.]
By Sarah Medina Posted: 10/14/2012 2:13 pm Updated: 10/14/2012 2:13 pm
Mom, Baby, and Duke the Dog. Duke reminds me
of one of our family dogs -- Hero -- who was a
shepherd/setter mix. He passed to the
Happy Hunting Ground in the mid 1970's.
A rescue dog is being called a hero after saving the life of a Portland, Conn., family's infant daughter.
The Brousseau family had already gone to bed on Sunday night when their dog, Duke, who was adopted nearly six years ago, jumped on their bed and began shaking uncontrollably. Duke's behavior immediately woke the couple up, reports the Orlando Sentinel.
"He is insanely obedient, so this was extremely bizarre," Jenna Brousseau told WFSB News.
Duke had never acted like this before, according to the Brousseaus, so they knew something had to be wrong. When they went into their 9-week-old daughter Harper's room to check on her, she wasn't breathing.
According to ABC, Jenna's husband immediatley called an ambulance. Baby Harper was then revived by paramedics, and taken to the hospital.
"If Duke hadn't been so scared, we would have just gone to sleep," Jenna Brousseau said of her heroic dog. She added, "He's the perfect dog, he was meant, meant to be ours."
Ashapoo the Dog. Looks like he has some Border
Collie blood -- a "herder" breed.
The spirit of Lassie is alive and well in a dog named Ashapoo. The trusty canine was always at the side of his owner's two-year-old grandson, Peyton.
And that was a good thing when Peyton's grandfather turned his back for a minute as he was planning to take the boy on a trip on the family land in Clover, South Carolina, to find a Christmas tree.
When he turned around, the energetic kid was gone. But so was Ashapoo.
By the time Peyton's parents showed up to join the hunt for their missing son on the 300 acres of woods, they took solace knowing the boy was with his faithful friend.
Said dad Rich Myrick to local station WBTV, "In the back of your mind, you know the dog is going to be with him."
Still, four and a half hours of a missing child takes a lot of faith. It was getting dark and cold. Mom Carmen Myrick noted to WCNC that she took in the hundreds of volunteers, ambulances, the media, and police cars. She says she remembers thinking, "'This is not going to end good.'"
When rescuers made their way to a barn, Ashapoo suddenly appeared, then ran away barking, leading searchers to a sleeping Peyton on the ground. He was fine.
The two-year-old told his family he was scared, he was going to get hurt, and he was cold. Dad Rich said, "I think he got scared and just lay down and took a nap, and Ashapoo stayed right with him." He added, "I guess he felt that was his job to protect him and be with him." And he also said, "I believe the dog was his guardian angel in fur."
The parents said that the dog was their hero. They plan to get him a well earned steak, and they are also looking into a GPS tracker for Peyton.
And this story, which sounds bizarre to me and am wondering if there is more here that wasn't told, but aside from whatever these parents may have been involved in, the baby was certainly innocent and was also saved by the actions of a dog:
Baby Angeles-Morales and unnamed Protector Dog,
a pit bull mix.
A kidnapping attempt was thwarted in Indianapolis on Tuesday when a family's dog stopped an armed would-be kidnapper from leaving the family's home.
Police say a man and a woman broke into the home of Nayeli Garzon-Jimenez through the back door while her husband was at work. Garzon-Jimenez was on the phone with her husband, Adolfo Angeles-Morales, at the time of the break-in.
"She started screaming and crying, and said, 'Someone just stuck their hand in the door,'" Angeles-Morales told WISH-TV. "The guy said, 'Give me the money or we take the baby.'"
"The man said, 'Money, money,'" Garzon-Jimenez said. "I said, 'I don't have any.'"
The woman then grabbed her 3-month-old girl and attempted to flee through the back door.
"But there was something else waiting for her at the back door," WISH-TV reported.
"One of the doggies," a pit bull mix, "didn't let her go through the back door," Angeles-Morales explained.
The woman turned around, "threw the baby back" at Garzon-Jimenez and the perpetrators fled the scene.
The mother, who was hit in the head with a gun during the melee, was treated for cuts and bruises at a local hospital, and was released. The baby was unharmed.
Indianapolis police are now searching for the suspects...
As scientific puzzles go, the origin of dogs may not be as important as the origin of the universe. But it strikes closer to home, and it almost seems harder to answer.
Cosmologists seem to have settled on the idea that 13.7 billion years ago the universe appeared with a bang (the big one) from nothing — albeit a kind of nothing that included the laws of physics.
With dogs, the consensus is that they came from wolves. Beyond that, there are varying claims. It seems dogs appeared sometime between 15,000 and 100,000 years ago, in Asia or Africa or multiple times in multiple places.
There is a reason for this confusion, according to Greger Larson at the University of Durham in England. In a new research paper, he argues that the DNA of modern dogs is so mixed up that it is useless in figuring out when and where dogs originated. “With the amount of DNA we’ve sequenced so far,” Dr. Larson said, “we’re lucky to get back a hundred years, max.” He says that only with the analysis of DNA from fossil dogs, now being done, will answers along this line emerge.
Adam Boyko of Cornell University, who has worked in the field of dog genetics but was not involved in the study, said that Dr. Larson’s group had a “fantastic data set,” and laid out clearly the current difficulties in nailing down the details of dog domestication. Dr. Larson and his colleagues analyzed 49,024 locations on dog DNA where the genetic code varies, so called SNPs (pronounced snips, for single nucleotide polymorphisms). They took the DNA from 1,375 dogs of 121 breeds, and 19 wolves.
What they found was that all the so-called modern breeds had been so mixed that their deep genetic history was obscured. [How can experts be so sure that this hasn't also happened with some "breeds" of humans???]
They also found six breeds that they called basal, meaning that their DNA was less mixed — the basenji, shar-pei, Saluki, Akita, Finnish spitz and Eurasier.
When they added these to eight breeds deemed ancient (older than 500 years) ["ancient" is only older than 500 years????] in other studies, what they found was that the dogs that were most genetically distinct were not from the places where the oldest archaeological and fossil evidence had been found. Dr. Larson said that the expectation was that if these breeds were closer genetically to the first domesticated dogs, they would be geographically closer as well, more likely to be found near the sites of early dog fossils, or archaeological records of ancient breeds.
Instead, the more genetically distinct dogs had been geographically isolated relatively recently in the history of domestication. For example, dingoes, basenjis and New Guinea singing dogs came from Southeast Asia and southern Africa, where dogs did not arrive until 3,500 and 1,400 years ago, respectively. Their distinctive genes were indications of relatively recent isolation. [This is fascinating. Didn't dog follow man? And if dog followed so-called "modern man" out of Africa, for instance, some 100,000 years ago, wouldn't Africa be one of the hot spots of wide-spread 'original' canine diversity, as it is said to be the hot spot for 'original' human genetic diversity? Hmmmm, perhaps something is wrong with the entire model being used to interpret evidence.]
But, he said, all is not lost. Humans have buried their dogs for a long time, and as a result there are fossils of truly ancient dogs, in the neighborhood of 15,000 years old, from which DNA can be extracted. Just as DNA from Neanderthals has helped illuminate the origins of modern humans, DNA from ancient dog fossils should help illuminate the story of early dog domestication in the next few years. [Actually, any "differences" between so-called "Neanderthal" and "modern humans" were basically non-existent because many "modern humans" carry "Neanderthal" DNA. If the "species" were that different, successful interbreeeding would not have been possible. "Neanderthal" did not die out, he and she exist today within lots of us!
“Let’s step back,” he said. “Let’s take a breath. We’re not a million miles away” from figuring out when and where dogs appeared. “We’re close.”
*************************************
Yeah, right. Close. Ha ha ha! You won't ever be close so long as you and other experts continue to insist that genetic diversity DECREASED over time for humans. Think about that for a minute. As humans spread across the globe, so current theory goes, isolated groups of humans that moved further and further away from the "parent group" developed distinct forms of DNA what-nots (I don't know all of the fancy terms) and they were less diverse than the "parent group," some of whom, I think, are said to have stayed back in Africa. So, as humans spread around the globe, we moved from a greatly diverse population, genetically speaking, to a much less genetically diverse population.
But our doggies, the genetic evidence is now showing, did the exact opposite. Hmmmmm, is there something wrong with this picture?
Hmmmmm. I would not argue that having man's best friend as a helper for hauling and hunting was not a benefit to mankind. I'm just wondering if so-called Neanderthal didn't have dogs too, but we just haven't found the evidence yet. Maybe we won't, either, because it 's just too old and doesn't exist anymore, or perhaps we don't recognize it for what it is. And when did it become accepted that mankind has had a relationship with canines for at least 27,000 years? The last I read, that relationship (canine domestication) was perhaps pushed back to some 17,000 or 18,000 years ago (it was not a straight line, one-time event, but happened in many different places with many different populations), but now we're talking about 10,000 years earlier than even 17,000 BCE (a controversial date to begin with). When did this happen and why didn't it make the news???
Over 20,000 years ago, humans won the evolutionary battle against Neanderthals. They may have had some assistance in that from their best friends.
One of the most compelling -- and enduring -- mysteries in archaeology concerns the rise of early humans and the decline of Neanderthals. For about 250,000 years, Neanderthals lived and evolved, quite successfully, in the area that is now Europe. Somewhere between 45,000 and 35,000 years ago, early humans came along.
They proliferated in their new environment, their population increasing tenfold in the 10,000 years after they arrived; Neanderthals declined and finally died away.
What happened? What went so wrong for the Neanderthals -- and what went so right for us humans?
The cause, some theories go, may have been environmental, with Neanderthals' decline a byproduct of -- yikes -- climate change. It may have been social as humans developed the ability to cooperate and avail themselves of the evolutionary benefits of social cohesion. It may have been technological, with humans simply developing more advanced tools and hunting weapons that allowed them to snare food while their less-skilled counterparts starved away.
The Cambridge researchers Paul Mellars and Jennifer French have another theory, though. In a paper in the journal Science, they concluded that "numerical supremacy alone may have been a critical factor" in human dominance -- with humans simply crowding out the Neanderthals. Now, with an analysis in American Scientist, the anthropologist Pat Shipman is building on their work. After analyzing the Mellars and French paper and comparing it with the extant literature, Shipman has come to an intriguing conclusion: that humans' comparative evolutionary fitness owes itself to the domestication of dogs.
Yep. Man's best friend, Shipman suggests, might also be humanity's best friend. Dogs might have been the technology that allowed early humans to flourish.
Shipman analyzed the results of excavations of fossilized canid bones -- from Europe, during the time when humans and Neanderthals overlapped. Put together, they furnish some compelling evidence that early humans, first of all, engaged in ritualistic dog worship. Canid skeletons found at a 27,000-year-old site in Předmostí, of the Czech Republic, displayed the poses of early ritual burial. Drill marks in canid teeth found at the same site suggest that early humans used those teeth as jewelry -- and Paleolithic people, Shipman notes, rarely made adornments out of animals they simply used for food. There's also the more outlying fact that, like humans, dogs are rarely depicted in cave art -- a suggestion that cave painters might have regarded dogs not as the game animals they tended to depict, but as fellow-travelers.
Shipman speculates that the affinity between humans and dogs manifested itself mainly in the way that it would go on to do for many more thousands of years: in the hunt. Dogs would help humans to identify their prey; but they would also work, the theory goes, as beasts of burden -- playing the same role for early humans as they played for the Blackfeet and Hidatsa of the American West, who bred large, strong dogs specifically for hauling strapped-on packs. (Paleolithic dogs were big to begin with: They had, their skeletons suggest, a body mass of at least 70 pounds and a shoulder height of at least 2 feet -- which would make them, at minimum, the size of a modern-day German Shepherd.) Since transporting animal carcasses is an energy-intensive task, getting dogs to do that work would mean that humans could concentrate their energy on more productive endeavors: hunting, gathering, reproducing.
The possible result, Shipman argues, was a virtuous circle of cooperation -- one in which humans and their canine friends got stronger, together, over time.
There's another intriguing -- if conjecture-filled -- theory here, too. It could be, Shipman suggests, that dogs represented even more than companionate technologies to Paleolithic man. It could be that their cooperative proximity brought about its own effects on human evolution -- in the same way that the domestication of cattle led to humans developing the ability to digest milk. Shipman points to the "cooperative eye hypothesis," which builds on the observation that, compared to other primates, humans have highly visible sclerae (whites of the eyes). For purposes of lone hunting, sclerae represent a clear disadvantage: not only will your pesky eye-whites tend to stand out against a dark backdrop of a forest or rock, giving away your location, but they also reveal the direction of your gaze. It's hard to be a stealthy hunter when your eyes are constantly taking away your stealth.
Expressive eyes, however, for all their competitive disadvantage, have one big thing going for them: They're great at communicating. With early humans hunting in groups, "cooperative eyes" may have allowed them to "talk" with each other, silently and therefore effectively: windows to the soul that are also evolutionarily advantageous. And that, in turn, might have led to a more ingrained impulse toward cooperation. Human babies, studies have shown, will automatically follow a gaze once a connection is made. Eye contact is second nature to us; but it's a trait that makes us unique among our fellow primates.
Dogs, however, also recognize the power of the gaze. In a study conducted at Central European University, Shipman notes, "dogs performed as well as human infants at following the gaze of a speaker in tests in which the speaker's head is held still." Humans and their best friends share an affinity for eye contact -- and we are fairly unique in that affinity. There's a chance, Shipman says -- though there's much more work to be done before that chance can be converted even into a hypothesis -- that we evolved that affinity together.
"No genetic study has yet confirmed the prevalence or absence of white sclerae in Paleolithic modern humans or in Neanderthals," Shipman notes. "But if the white sclera mutation occurred more often among the former -- perhaps by chance -- this feature could have enhanced human-dog communication and promoted domestication." [Well, until such a study is done canvassing all known prehistoric bones -- if it even can be done given the age of the DNA we're talking about here -- this will forever remain conjecture only.]
Which is another way of saying that, to the extent dogs were an evolutionary technology, they may have been a technology that changed us for the better. The old truism -- we shape our tools, and afterward our tools shape us -- may be as old, and as true, as humanity itself.
Jan. 23, 2012) — A 33,000-year-old dog skull unearthed in a Siberian mountain cave presents some of the oldest known evidence of dog domestication and, together with an equally ancient find in a cave in Belgium, indicates that modern dogs may be descended from multiple ancestors.
If you think a Chihuahua doesn't have much in common with a Rottweiler, you might be on to something.
An ancient dog skull, preserved in a cave in the Altai Mountains of Siberia for 33,000 years, presents some of the oldest known evidence of dog domestication and, together with equally ancient dog remains from a cave in Belgium, indicates that domestication of dogs may have occurred repeatedly in different geographic locations rather than with a single domestication event.
In other words, man's best friends may have originated from more than one ancient ancestor, contrary to what some DNA evidence previously has indicated.
"Both the Belgian find and the Siberian find are domesticated species based on morphological characteristics," said Greg Hodgins, a researcher at the University of Arizona's Accelerator Mass
Spectrometry Laboratory and co-author of the study that reports the find.
"Essentially, wolves have long thin snouts and their teeth are not crowded, and domestication results in this shortening of the snout and widening of the jaws and crowding of the teeth."
The Altai Mountain skull is extraordinarily well preserved, said Hodgins, enabling scientists to make multiple measurements of the skull, teeth and mandibles that might not be possible on less well-preserved remains. "The argument that it is domesticated is pretty solid," said Hodgins. "What's interesting is that it doesn't appear to be an ancestor of modern dogs."
The UA's Accelerator Mass Spectrometry Laboratory used radiocarbon dating to determine the age of the Siberian skull.
Radioactive carbon, or carbon-14, is one of three carbon isotopes. Along with naturally occurring carbon dioxide, carbon-14 reaches the surface of Earth by atmospheric circulation, where plants absorb it into their tissues through photosynthesis.
Animals and humans take in carbon-14 by ingesting plants or other animals that have eaten plants. "Carbon-14 makes it into all organic molecules," said Hodgins. "It's in all living things."
"We believe that carbon-14 production is essentially constant over time," said Hodgins. "So the amount of carbon-14 present in living organisms in the past was similar to the levels in living organisms today. When an animal or plant dies, the amount of carbon-14 in its remains drops at a predictable rate, called the radioactive half-life. The half-life of radiocarbon is 5,730 years."
"People from all over the world send our laboratory samples of organic material that they have dug out of the ground and we measure how much carbon-14 is left in them. Based on that measurement, and knowing the radiocarbon half-life, we calculate how much time must have passed since the samples had the same amount of carbon-14 as plants and animals living today."
The researchers use a machine called an accelerator mass spectrometer to measure the amount of radioactive carbon remaining in a sample. The machine works in a manner analogous to what happens when a beam of white light passes through a prism: White light separates into the colors of the rainbow.
The accelerator mass spectrometer generates a beam of carbon from the sample and passes it through a powerful magnet, which functions like a prism. "What emerges from it are three beams, one each of the three carbon isotopes," said Hodgins. "The lightest carbon beam, carbon-12, bends the most, and then carbon-13 bends slightly less and carbon-14 bends slightly less than that."
The relative intensities of the three beams represent the sample's carbon mass spectrum. Researchers compare the mass spectrum of an unknown sample to the mass spectra of known-age controls and from this comparison, calculate the sample's radiocarbon age.
At 33,000 years old, the Siberian skull predates a period known as the Last Glacial Maximum, or LGM, which occurred between about 26,000 and 19,000 years ago when the ice sheets of Earth's last ice age reached their greatest extent and severely disrupted the living patterns of humans and animals alive during that time. Neither the Belgian nor the Siberian domesticated lineages appear to have survived the LGM.
However, the two skulls indicate that the domestication of dogs by humans occurred repeatedly throughout early human history at different geographical locations, which could mean that modern dogs have multiple ancestors rather than a single common ancestor.
"In terms of human history, before the last glacial maximum people were living with wolves or canid species in widely separated geographical areas of Euro-Asia, and had been living with them long enough that they were actually changing evolutionarily," said Hodgins. "And then climate change happened, human habitation patterns changed and those relationships with those particular lineages of animals apparently didn't survive."
"The interesting thing is that typically we think of domestication as being cows, sheep and goats, things that produce food through meat or secondary agricultural products such as milk, cheese and wool and things like that," said Hodgins.
"Those are different relationships than humans may have with dogs. The dogs are not necessarily providing products or meat. They are probably providing protection, companionship and perhaps helping on the hunt. And it's really interesting that this appears to have happened first out of all human relationships with animals."
Even the most hardened soldier can escape grievous wounds on the battlefield
only to suffer deeply painful psychological traumas after returning home. And
unfortunately, the same pattern of psychic trauma seems to apply for the dogs
that help provide essential services for military men and women.
The relationship between military dogs and the service members who own them
is a complex one. In fact, as recently as March, the military was highlighting
the use of dogs to help treat human soldiers suffering from PTSD.
The study of canine PTSD is only about 18 months old, Dao reports, even
though animal behavior has been studied for centuries:
Like humans with the analogous disorder, different dogs show different
symptoms. Some become hyper-vigilant. Others avoid buildings or work areas that
they had previously been comfortable in. Some undergo sharp changes in
temperament, becoming unusually aggressive with their handlers, or clingy and
timid. Most crucially, many stop doing the tasks they were trained to
perform.
"If the dog is trained to find improvised explosives and it looks like it's
working, but isn't, it's not just the dog that's at risk," said Dr. Walter F.
Burghardt Jr., chief of behavioral medicine at the Daniel E. Holland Military
Working Dog Hospital at Lackland Air Force Base "This is a human health issue
as well."
Military dogs have reportedly become the most effective tool for detecting
improvised explosive devices (IED's) in the battlefield. IED's are typically
composed of chemicals, rather than metals--which makes them especially hard to
detect via conventional electronic monitoring systems.
And as Dao goes on to explain, testing the dogs for PTSD is a complex
process:
In a series of videos that Dr. Burghardt uses to train veterinarians to spot
canine PTSD, one shepherd barks wildly at the sound of gunfire that it had once
tolerated in silence. Another can be seen confidently inspecting the interior of
cars but then refusing to go inside a bus or a building. Another sits listlessly
on a barrier wall, then after finally responding to its handler's summons, runs
away from a group of Afghan soldiers.
Once a military dog is diagnosed with PTSD, Dr. Burghardt works directly with
veterinarians on treatment:
Since the patient cannot explain what is wrong, veterinarians and handlers
must make educated guesses about the traumatizing events. Care can be as simple
as taking a dog off patrol and giving it lots of exercise, play time and gentle
obedience training.
More serious cases will receive what Dr. Burghardt calls "desensitization
counter-conditioning," which entails exposing the dog at a safe distance to a
sight or sound that might trigger a reaction—a gunshot, a loud bang or a
vehicle, for instance. If the dog does not react, it is rewarded, and the
trigger—"the spider in a glass box," Dr. Burghardt calls it—is moved
progressively closer until the dog is comfortable with it.
Some dogs are even treated
with the anti-anxiety drug Xanax. That regimen permits them not merely to
recover from their trauma, experts say--it also helps them eventually return to
active duty. Those dogs unable to re-enlist are allowed to retire, either with
an adoptive family or an inactive service member.
HOW THE FLYING F CAN A DOG 'RE-ENLIST?' AS IF IT'S VOLUNTARY ON THE DOG'S PART?
By Ross MacDonald . He did not include dogs playing chess.
What the evolutionary history of the dog tells us about another animal: ourselves. From a cave in France, a new picture has emerged of canines as our prehistoric soulmates.
Chauvet Cave in southern France houses the oldest representational paintings ever discovered. Created some 32,000 years ago, the 400-plus images of large grazing animals and the predators who hunted them form a multi-chambered Paleolithic bestiary. Many scholars believe that these paintings mark the emergence of a recognizably modern human consciousness. We feel that we know their creators, even though they are from a time and place as alien as another planet.
What most intrigues many people about the cave, however, is not the artwork but a set of markings at once more human and more mysterious: the bare footprints of an 8- to 10-year-old torch-bearing boy left in the mud of a back chamber some 26,000 years ago—and, alongside one of them, the paw print of his traveling companion, variously identified as a wolf or a large dog.
Attributing that paw print to a dog or even to a socialized wolf has been controversial since it was first proposed a decade ago. It would push back by some 12,000 years the oldest dog on record. More than that: Along with a cascade of other new scientific findings, it could totally rewrite the story of man and dog and what they mean to each other.
For decades, the story told by science has been that today's dogs are the offspring of scavenger wolves who wandered into the villages established by early humans at the end of the last ice age, about 15,000 years ago. This view emphasizes simple biological drive—to feed on human garbage, the scavenging wolf had to behave in a docile fashion toward humans. And—being human—we responded in kind, seeking out dogs for their obsequiousness and unconditional devotion.
As the story goes, these tame wolves bred with other tame wolves and became juvenilized. Think of them as wolves-lite, diminished in strength, stamina and brains. They resembled young wolves, with piebald coats, floppy ears and shorter, weaker jaws. Pleading whiners, they drowned their human marks in slavish devotion and unconditional love. Along the way, they lost their ability to kill and consume their prey.
But it was never clear, in this old account, just how we got from the scavenging wolf to the remarkable spectrum of dogs who have existed over time, from fell beasts trained to terrorize and kill people to creatures so timid that they flee their own shadows. The standard explanation was that once the dump-diver became a dog, humans took charge of its evolution through selective breeding, choosing those with desired traits and culling those who came up short.
This account is now falling apart in the face of new genetic analyses and recently discovered fossils. The emerging story sees humans and proto-dogs evolving together: We chose them, to be sure, but they chose us too, and our shared characteristics may well account for our seemingly unshakable mutual intimacy.
Dogs and humans are social beings who depend on cooperation for their survival and have an uncanny ability to understand each other in order to work together. Both wolves and humans brought unique, complementary talents to a relationship that was based not on subservience and intimidation but on mutual respect.
It seems that wolves and humans met on the trail of the large grazing animals that they both hunted, and the most social members of both species gravitated toward each other. Several scholars have even suggested that humans learned to hunt from wolves. At the least, camps with wolf sentinels had a competitive advantage over those without. And people whose socialized wolves would carry packs had an even greater advantage, since they could transport more supplies. Wolves benefited as well by gaining some relief from pup rearing, protection for themselves and their offspring, and a steadier food supply.
The relationship between dogs and humans has been so mutually beneficial and enduring that some scholars have suggested that we—dog and human—influenced each other's evolution.
The Chauvet Cave "dogwolf"—the term I use for a doglike, or highly socialized, wolf who kept company with humans—is controversial, but it cannot easily be dismissed. Over the past three years, it has been grouped convincingly with a number of similar animals that have been identified in Belgium, the Czech Republic, Ukraine and the Altai Mountains in Southern Siberia, dating from 33,000 to 16,000 years ago.
Identification of these early dogs, combined with recent genetic evidence and a growing understanding of animals not as stimulus-response machines but as sentient beings, has broken the consensus model of dog domestication—leaving intact little more than the recognition of the grey wolf, Canis lupus, as progenitor of the dog. Everything else, it seems, is up for grabs.
According to the old view, the dog arose around 15,000 years ago in the Middle East. (Or in China, south of the Yangtze River, an alternate possible origin point added in the last decade in an attempt to reconcile archaeological evidence with emerging DNA evidence.)
The first major challenge to the consensus came in 1997, when an international team of biologists published a paper in the journal Science placing the origin of the dog as early as 135,000 years ago. Their date was based on analysis of mitochondrial DNA, which is passed on to offspring through females and is believed to change little from generation to generation; it allows scientists to calculate the time when populations or species separated genetically. This analysis suggested that wolves could have become dogs wherever in Eurasia they associated closely with early humans, and that even after the split was made, dogs and wolves continued to interbreed.
In short, because of their natural affinities, wherever and whenever wolves and humans met on the trail, some of them began to keep company. Often, when socialized wolves died, there were no others immediately available to replace them. But sometimes several socialized wolves would mate or a socialized female would mate with a "wild" wolf and then have her litter near the human camp. The pups would stay or go, according to their natures. This kind of arrangement could have continued for a considerable period. Any number of them could ultimately have produced dogwolves or dogs. Most of those lines would have vanished over time.
The DNA evidence remained controversial for years, even as most major studies placed the genetic separation of wolf and dog at earlier dates than those favored by archaeologists. Hard proof was slow to appear. The Chauvet Cave paw print once provided the only physical evidence for the existence of dogs before 15,000 years ago—and it was, at best, an indirect piece of support.
Then in 2008, Mietje Germonpré, a paleontologist at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Science and the leader of an international team of scientists, re-examined fossil material excavated from Goyet Cave in Belgium in the late 19th century and announced the identification of a 31,700-year-old dog, a large and powerful animal who ate reindeer, musk oxen and horses. The dogwolf from Goyet Cave was a creature of the Aurignacian culture that had produced the art in Chauvet Cave. [This is the same culture that some archaeologists are now arguing settled along the east coast of the United States some 50,000 years ago.]
Last July, another international team identified the remains of a 33,000-year-old "incipient dog" from the Altai Mountains in southern Siberia. This month, Ms. Germonpré confirmed another find, this one in the Czech Republic, of the remains of a 26,000- to 27,000-year-old dog that had been buried with a bone in its mouth—perhaps to fuel it as it accompanied its human companion to the afterlife.
While the old consensus model held that the first dogs were small, these and other recently identified early dogs are large animals, often with shorter noses and broader faces than today's wolves. These early dogs appear in the camps of hunters of horses, reindeer, mammoths and other big game. From all appearances, they were pack animals, guards, hunters and companions. They are perhaps best viewed as the offspring of highly socialized wolves who had begun breeding in or near human camps.
Our view of domestication as a process has also begun to change, with recent research showing that, in dogs, alterations in only a small number of genes can have large effects in terms of size, shape and behavior. Far from being a product of the process of domestication, the mutations that separated early dogs from wolves may have arisen naturally in one or more small populations; the mutations were then perpetuated by humans through directed breeding. Geneticists have identified, for instance, a mutation in a single gene that appears to be responsible for smallness in dogs, and they have shown that the gene itself probably came from Middle Eastern wolves.
All of this suggests that it was common for highly socialized wolves and people to form alliances. It also leads logically to the conclusion that the first dogs were born on the move with bands of hunter-gatherers—not around semi-permanent pre-agricultural settlements. This may explain why it has proven so difficult to identify a time and place of domestication.
Taken together, these recent discoveries have led some scientists to conclude that the dog became an evolutionary inevitability as soon as humans met wolves. Highly social wolves and highly social humans started walking, playing and hunting together and never stopped. The dog is literally the wolf who stayed, who traded wolf society for human society.
Humans did wield a significant influence over dogs, of course, by using breeding to perpetuate mutations affecting their shape, size and physical abilities. Recent studies suggest that the dog has unique abilities among animals to follow human directions and that its capacity for understanding words can approach that of a two-year-old child. To various degrees, humans appear to have concentrated those and other characteristics and traits through selective breeding.
Since the advent of scientific breeding in the late 18th century, humans have altered the look and temperament of the dog more than they had over thousands of preceding years. A team of gene-sequencers at the Broad Institute of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology estimated that the dog lost 4% of its genetic diversity during its initial separation from the wolf. Much greater losses have occurred as a result of modern breed formation, one result of which is the more than 400 inheritable diseases to which purebreds are uniquely vulnerable.
Recent genetic evidence has confirmed that certain basic types—pariah dogs, sight hounds, mastiffs, spitz-type dogs and small dogs—arose very early in the transformation of wolf to dog. These dogs adapted to their homelands and often had special talents as hunters, guards and eventually herders. These characteristics were often perpetuated over time.
Scientific breeders believed they could improve on nature by consolidating several similar types into one breed or isolating a few prize specimens from a larger population. In both cases, they relied on inbreeding to create and perpetuate the look and talents they wanted. With the advent of kennel clubs in the mid-19th century, the pace of breed creation picked up.
Breeders began to create dogs to fit the needs of the wealthy—from sporting dogs that could point and retrieve fowl, to little puppy-like lap dogs. The dog proved to be a wonderful animal for testing the skill of breeders, since it could be stretched in size from two to 200 pounds.
Purebred dogs were expensive commodities until after World War II, when they became symbols of arrival in the middle class. Increased demand led to increased breeding, often in puppy mills. The resulting dogs had health and behavior problems from bad breeding and the poor care of pregnant females and newborn puppies.
In some cases, the traits that breeders desire are inherited along with unwanted, debilitating conditions—such as when blindness and epilepsy accompany particular coat styles and eye colors. In many regards, the original, naturally occurring breeds were healthier and better at their appointed tasks than their purebred heirs.
But this is just the most recent chapter of a long tale. The tableau in the mud of Chauvet Cave is a stark reminder that dogs and humans have traveled together for tens of thousands of years, from ancient hunting camps to farms, ranches cities and suburbs—from the tropics to the poles. The relationship has endured not because dogs are juvenilized wolves but because they are dogs—our faithful companions.
—Mr. Derr's most recent book is "How the Dog Became the Dog: From Wolves to Our Best Friends."
The remains of three Paleolithic dogs, including one with a mammoth bone in its mouth, have been unearthed at Predmosti in the Czech Republic, according to a new Journal of Archaeological Science paper.
The remains indicate what life was like for these prehistoric dogs in this region, and how humans viewed canines. The dogs appear to have often sunk their teeth into meaty mammoth bones. These weren’t just mammoth in terms of size, but came from actual mammoths.
In the case of the dog found with the bone in its mouth, the researchers believe a human inserted it there after death.
"The thickness of the cortical bone shows that it is from a large mammal, like a rhinoceros, steppe bison or mammoth," lead author Mietje Germonpre told Discovery News. "At Predmosti, mammoth is the best represented animal, with remains from more than 1,000 individuals, so it is probable that the bone fragment is from a mammoth."
Germonpre, a paleontologist at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences, and colleagues Martina Laznickova-Galetova and Mikhail Sablin, first studied the remains, focusing on the skulls, to see what animals they represented. In the fossil record, there is sometimes controversy over what is a wolf, dog or other canid.
"These skulls show clear signs of domestication," Germonpre said, explaining they are significantly shorter than those of fossil or modern wolves, have shorter snouts, and noticeably wider braincases and palates than wolves possess.
She described them as large, with an estimated body weight of just over 77 pounds. The shoulder height was at least 24 inches.
"The shape of their skull resembles that of a Siberian husky, but they were larger and heavier than the modern Husky," she said.
The dogs died when they were between 4 and 8 years old, suffering from numerous broken teeth during their lifetimes.
Based on what is known of the human culture at the site, the researchers believe these dogs “were useful as beasts of burden for the hauling of meat, bones and tusks from mammoth kill sites and of firewood, and to help with the transport of equipment, limiting the carrying costsof the Predmosti people.”
Since mammoth meat was likely the food staple, the scientists further believe that the surplus meat “would have been available to feed the dogs.”
The dog skulls show evidence that humans perforated them in order to remove the brain. Given that better meat was available, the researchers think it’s unlikely the brains served as food.
Instead, based on these archaeological finds and the ethnographic record, it’s possible that the body manipulation after death held ritual importance.
"Among many northern indigenous peoples, it was believed that the head contains the spirit or soul," Germonpre explained. “Some of these peoples made a hole in the braincase of the killed animal so that the spirit might be released.”
The mammoth bone in the dog's mouth could signify "that the dog was 'fed' to accompany the soul of the dead person on its journey."
Rob Losey, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Alberta, told Discovery News that the new study is "very convincing," and shows "quite clearly that the dog domestication process was underway thousands of years earlier than previously thought."
What the article didn't address specifically is how OLD the burials are estimated to be?
I did a little digging around and found that Predmosti is well known for a long-term established "camp" of mammoth hunters dating from between about 27,000 to 24,300 years ago! Does that mean that the dog burials are that old too? That would be incredible. Modern theory now acknowledges that dogs were domesticated in several different places by several different populations, independently of each other - there wasn't just one group of dogs from which all current domesticated dogs spring. As far as I'm aware, the oldest evidence for dog domestication is froma bout 16,000 years ago.
This is an incredible discovery. If this dating is correct, the domestication of the dogs at Predmosti was already well established about 10,000 years BEFORE the other oldest evidence of domestication we know of currently. WOW!
That final touch - putting a bone in a beloved doggy's mouth - that's what got me. Although it's been seven years since the youngest of my three doggies died, there's not a day goes by that I don't think of them and miss them.
Dogs are in the news - not always in a good way. Dogs and tigers and bears, oh my!
Is there a pack of "bloodthirsty" killer wild dogs on the loose in Stevens County, northeast Washington state? That's what some folks are saying and here is a photograph of at least one of the guilty canines taken by a security camera at one of the farms where an animal was allegedly killed by the pack. What the hell kind of dog is this? A - get ready for it - HELL HOUND. Bwwwwaaaahhhhaaaaa!
Fri Jun 10, 3:36 pm ET Bloodthirsty pack of dogs take out 350-lb. llama
By Liz Goodwin
I would not want to meet such a critter in a dark alley, or even a light alley.
Trouble and her human, Leona Helmsley. Date unknown.
Photo from story.
Leona Helmsley's cute little poochy died at age 12, evidently in December, 2010. You may remember that after Helmsley's death the dog was left millions of dollars in trust for his care. This little doggy, who never hurt anyone in his entire life, received death threats! Some people are just so fricking sick it's not funny. Trouble, the dog, lost his beloved owner, and then - according to the story - lost at least two more family caretakers - during what was left of his life. People who know dogs know that they mourn and grieve, and they do remember lost loved ones. Trouble the dog suffered a lot of trauma. So-called scientists who have studied dogs and say stupid things like dogs don't have emotions and aren't all that intelligent haven't spent enough time with them and really gotten to know them. Now, the cemetery where Leona Helmsley is buried refuses to let the dog's remains be buried with her, although she specified that this was her wish. I mean, come on! You won't let the lady have her last wish to have her beloved pet buried with her? How low can you go? As low as someone making death threats to a dog? Geez.
You know things are really going to the dogs when police dogs lose their jobs! Here are two recent reports of canine heros who have been "laid off" because of budget crunches. Why not lay off police horses? They eat a lot more!
Police Dog Laid Off In Jeannette Wando, 3 Officers Victims Of Budget Cuts
POSTED: 1:50 pm EDT September 28, 2010
UPDATED: 8:05 pm EDT September 28, 2010
Wando says, you took a crappy picture of me and my human, dude!
JEANNETTE, Pa. -- Budget issues in one Westmoreland County community has left a four-footed officer without a job.
Channel 4 Action News' Jennifer Miele reported that Jeannette City Council voted to lay off three police officers effective next Tuesday, about a quarter of the force, because of budgetary concerns.
The layoffs include the department's K-9 unit, Officer Justin Scalzo and his drug dog, Wando.
Time Magazine on line reports that 5-year old Canine drug-sniffer Daro was laid off:
Reported June 8, 2011 In This Recession, Even a Police Dog Got Laid Off
(No photo of Daro)
This story may have more to do with a dispute with the doggy's handler - but then you know how those politicians twist everything around to make an innocent person look like a villain - especially when it comes ot budget cuts. I say - CUT THE GOVERNORS - CUT THE LT. GOVERNORS. CUT THE ATTORNEYS-GENERAL, who the hell needs them when it's the assistant attorneys prosecuting all the cases and doing all the work anyway? CUT ALL DEPARTMENT HEADS. The workers make up their own schedules and police themselves, so who needs departmental heads? They add absolutely no value to the services that government provides. All they do is take up desk space and shuffle paper around all day trying to look busy. I've interacted with these people for years, I know whereof I speak!
Keep the dogs! Dogs earn their pay and work without complaint. Dogs love us and will never leave us, no matter if we're jerks. Dogs always give 150% because they want to please us. Dogs can teach us a lot about being human beings.
Dogs, millions of them, sometimes only hours old, were ritually killed and then carefully mummified and buried inside wooden coffins in a labyrinth of tunnels lying underneath the sacred ground of Saqqara in Egypt. Dating mostly to the Late Period (after pollution of Egyptian religious concepts by Greek and Roman practices, which tended more toward the barbarian), archaeologists claim the site is a testament to the enduring legacy of using an "intermediary" between man and gods - in this case, "dog" headed Anubis. Hmmmm, I wonder if anyone bothered to check with Anubis to see what He thought about this slaughter of innocent canine flesh...
An elaborate labyrinth of sacred tunnels, containing the mummified remains of millions of dogs, has been excavated under the Egyptian desert. The Catacombs of Anubis project, led by Paul Nicholson of Cardiff University, is examining the tunnels beneath the desert at Saqqara, which make up the catacomb for the burial of animals sacred to the dog or jackal-headed god Anubis.
The Dog Catacomb has been known since the 19th Century but has never been properly excavated before. The excavation team’s latest estimate is that some 8,000,000 animals – most of them dogs or jackals – were buried there. Work on the animal bones suggests that they were only hours or days old when they were killed and mummified. It is likely the dogs were bred in their thousands in special puppy farms around the ancient Egyptian capital of Memphis.
Dr Paul Nicholson, of Cardiff University’s School of History, Archaeology and Religion, said: “Our findings indicate a rather different view of the relationship between people and the animals they worshipped than that normally associated with the ancient Egyptians, since many animals were killed and mummified when only a matter of hours or days old. These animals were not strictly ‘sacrificial’. Rather, the dedication of an animal mummy was regarded as a pious act, with the animal acting as intermediary between the donor and the gods.”
The team is hoping that the geological work on the catacomb will help the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities, who have generously permitted the work, in monitoring the site for its long term preservation.
Watch what you say, or they'll be calling you a radical, a liberal, an intellectual, a criminal... The Logical Song (paraphrased), Supertramp, 1979
"We are what we defend, what we stand up for." Da Vinci Code, as spoken by the character Sophie Saunier in the movie version to character Professor Robert Langdon.
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I'm one of the founders of Goddesschess, which went online May 6, 1999. I earned an under-graduate degree in history and economics going to college part-time nights, weekends and summer school while working full-time, and went on to earn a post-graduate degree (J.D.) I love the challenge of research, and spend my spare time reading and writing about my favorite subjects, travelling and working in my gardens. My family and my friends are most important in my life. For the second half of my life, I'm focusing on "doable" things to help local chess initiatives, starting in my own home town. And I'm experiencing a sort of personal "Renaissance" that is leaving me rather breathless...
