I loved visiting the ancient city of Pompeii back in 2018. Located close to modern day Naples, Pompeii was buried in 4-6 metres of volcanic ash from a Mt. Vesuvius eruption almost 2,000 years ago. The city was largely preserved under the ash, so once excavated, it give us an amazing snapshot into what life was like in the ancient world.
Spoiler alert, it’s much the same! They lived in homes, had bakeries, schools, and gymnasiums. The mechanics of daily life have barely changed.
One of the things that stood out to me was a mosaic tiling in the one of the homes. It was an image of man’s best friend, with an accompanying message, “Beware of the Dog!”. Dogs were clearly an important part of the social fabric of families and society back then.
At the time, I said to my family, “Isn’t it amazing that we have the same relationships with dogs today as they did in the ancient world?”
I didn’t stop to think about how much further back this relationship actually started.
However, this week I came across a study where zoo archaeologists and evolutionary biologists teamed up to find that “sometime toward the end of the last ice age, a group of humans armed with stone-tipped spears stalked their prey in the bitter cold of northeastern Siberia, tracking bison and woolly mammoths across a vast, grassy landscape. Beside them ran wolflike creatures, more docile than their ancestors and remarkably willing to help their primate companions hunt down prey and drag it back to camp. These were the world’s first dogs.”
If true, the earliest known domestication of dogs was 23,000 years ago! To put this in perspective, we only started farming 11,000 years ago, and were completely nomadic before this.
Maru and I are dog people, and we can’t wait to one day have a dog of our own. And there may just be 23,000 years of evolutionary conditioning to explain why!