I read a book on the history of dogs https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/40180044-once-a-wolf
The only thing I remember is he said dogs may have stuck around humans because, like wolves today do with others predators, they could follow them around and scavenge off their successful hunts. But it was also possible the wolves/dogs just really liked snacking in between meals. Wolves are very capable at finding their own food but they enjoyed some meat & bones thrown to them in between their daily rounds. That's what crossed the line between scavenging on the outside and a closer relationship.
My pet theory is that humans captured wolf pups, possibly by dealing with parents first, and kept them around as pets. People love playing with tiger, bear, and wolf pups and keeping them as pets today.
It would take generations of breeding the tamest ones, with the behaviors you wanted, to get something like the beginnings of domesticated dogs.
It also makes me wonder about the longlasting question of speciation. If it happens suddenly, shouldn't that indicate a singular (or near-singular) instance of mutation?
". Within just 15 generations of selective breeding, the experiment had yielded foxes that could live with people."
Maybe they were very tame to begin with? Like the extinct Falkland wolf:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falkland_Islands_wolf
"There were no forests for the animal to hide in, and it had no fear of humans;[citation needed] it was possible to lure the animal with a chunk of meat held in one hand, and kill it with a knife held in the other"
Took 3 hours to get to by ferry, and one of the enticements was that "we have these dwarf deer, and they have no fear of man. You just walk up to them and hit them on the head with a stick".
I presume there was nothing larger than a fox on that island, for a deer to have no fear.
Humans broke the game by allying with or exterminating other apex predators. I don’t believe another double-apex alliance is seen anywhere else, in our biosphere or in the fossil record.
For example, there are around 30 billion chickens in the world, butchered within 6-8 weeks. Repeat.
Domestication was partly the result of not eliminating apex predators. A shepherd would guard a flock of sheep, and farmers would historically live/sleep near/with the animals, to protect them day and night.
[1] https://wildlife.org/on-a-global-scale-livestock-outweighs-w...
We've broken the game so many damn times, humans are awesome and we need to keep being awesome.
Somebodies gotta prevent an asteroid from killing the earth over these next 100 years.
It ain't gonna be the dolphins.
Speaking of which, we really need to ask the dolphins if they'd like some thumbs.
I'm not sure about that.
Don't get me wrong, an example of a super-volcano is Yellowstone National Park, so I agree we can't prevent them
Rather, looking at the pandemic response and various wars, I think (most) world governments are competent enough to re-organise labour and national diets to mitigate the problems one would cause: covering farms in poly-tunnels, having "national service" that's about building/repurposing farming infrastructure rather than military function, food rationing, changes to farming laws to make sure livestock is only on land that doesn't support intensive crops, etc.
We absolutely can, and extract geothermal energy from the system to boot.
Everything I've seen suggests that the thermal mass of the Yellowstone magma reservoir is order-of 10km each way (so 1000km^3 total), density order-of 3 kg/litre, and heat capacity order-of 1500 J/kg K, so lowering the temperature of that reservoir by 100 K would still yield about the entire world's energy consumption in 2017: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=1000km%5E3+*+3kg%2Fl+*+...
Even though this would combine both left-coded and right-coded aspects of the USA's politics (right: the USA's love of energy intensity; left: in this scenario it helps the environment not be made of fire), I find it dubious that the US would (or could) construct enough power plants to reach that scale.
(China might even want to help, but at this point I find myself too cynical of both China and the USA for that to happen even in an emergency).
We domesticated plants animals for their meat, products and labour. We also domesticated dogs. This isn’t an either or.
Wolves are, though.
jimnotgym•2mo ago
actionfromafar•2mo ago