A New Origin Story for Dogs | Hacker News Reader

A New Origin Story for Dogs

theatlantic.com

82 pointstokenadult31 comments

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> But after decades of dogged effort, he and his fellow scientists are still arguing about the answers.

> Other canine genetics experts think that Larson’s barking up the wrong tree.

> Of all the problems that scientists struggle with, why has the origin of dogs been such a bitch to solve?

It seems like the author was in some sort of pun writing competition.

You missed hounded

Also, doggy style.

Sorry, I haven't been dogmatic about listing all the puns.

Where is your dog now?

I don't have a dog in this fight

My dogma was just run over by your karma.

If you own such an author, please keep him muzzled and leashed, and scoop up those puns.

I have a patch for the article:

  @@ -1234,5 +1234,7 @@
   Larson, who is fast-talking, eminently likable,
  +playful, loyal, up-to-date with all his shots,
  +certified free of fleas and ticks,
   and grounded in both archaeology and genetics,
  -has been gathering fossils and collaborators
  +has been retrieving fossils and collaborators
   in an attempt to yank the DNA out of as many dog
   and wolf fossils as he can.

A bunch of my friends are journalist and they all constantly challenge each other to try and get particular words, sentences, or references published. While they might be an exception (they're all friends with each other), I wouldn't be surprised if this is very common. Their version of easter eggs, I suppose.

This story has the vibe of a TED talk, it's got scientists with different opinions, a grand scope and scale of tens of thousands of years, plus dogs, which we all love.

I really do think humans were doing interesting things tens of thousands of years ago. Some of it was written down, and some of it only survives through oral traditions but the ideas and actions of those people in that era still impact us today.

Some of those things are animals like the cat that is trying to sit on my laptop right now.

> like the cat that is trying to sit on my laptop right now

Or the Pitt that informed me it's bed time by sitting on my head :P

> oral traditions

People can't even be orally consistent over 100 years.

There's no such thing as oral traditions that are anything more than 100's of years old.

We can watch fiction stories that were written down evolve at the 100 year speed.

I like to take in account the distortion as a meaningful information. It says things about what people perceived and desired somehow.

If you like, but it doesn't tell us anything about what was happening ten thousand years ago, just what has happened in the meantime.

There are some cool overlaps between Australian aboriginal oral traditions and past events:

https://theconversation.com/finding-meteorite-impacts-in-abo...

Maybe, but I'm not convinced that they're anything other than some lucky coincidences.

>He said his people were forbidden from going near the craters, as that was where the fire-devil ran down from the sun and set the land ablaze, killing people and forming the giant holes.

Australian Aboriginal mythology attributes every geographical landmark to the action of some kind of spirit in the dreamtime. These rocks are three sisters who ran away from their family and were turned to stone. This river was formed by a giant snake. The vast majority of the stories are, of course, just made-up guesses, so there's a pretty uphill battle to make a convincing case that one isn't.

A crater, well, it looks like what you get when you throw a rock into the sand, so that part of the myth is an obvious guess, that it was caused by some big force acting from above.

There are definitely oral traditions that are very old.

Yes stories evolve, but there is a core that makes them unique, which can be traced almost like DNA. There is real evidence that a lot of fairy tales are thousands of years old.

http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/01/on-the-or...

I always wondered how come the first animal to be domesticated happened to be a predator? Sheep and goats seems much easier to control around and call it as domestication. I guess it had something to do with the way humans lived at that time, 30-40'000 years ago. I imagine that as hunters, they were more inclined to accept hunting helpers than to try herding herbivores.

Herbivores flee us. Other predators will show us a respectful distance, but are much less fearful. So we can start an informal relationship with a few wolves or such by throwing them a bit of meat from a big kill. I'd much rather tame a carnivore; it'd be vastly easier. And taming is the forerunner to domestication.

Same story from the CNRS:

https://news.cnrs.fr/articles/rethinking-the-origin-of-dogs

Look out. That page always Redirects me to a Malware page after a few seconds.

Problem may be on your end, or between you and The Atlantic. I've noticed no such issue, and VirusTotal gives it an all clear.[0]

[0]: https://www.virustotal.com/en/url/1baee95371f0f447bbdc2baa53...

Looks like an malicious ad placed through RTB. A decent AdExchange should not allow placement of such ads.

Interesting! Been a number of years since I worked for a company based on advertising revenue, but sounds like that malicious ad problem hasn't gone away.

I don't think you can say "before mathematics" like you say before internet, art etc.

It's like "before time" technically time, like math, always existed, humans just quantified it.

Time may not have always existed though.

If anything mathematics quantified humans rather than the other way around. That being kinda the spirit of the game.

Humans have been figuring out logically necessary consequences ever since they deserved the name human -- and thus doing maths. In this tradition, people like the Babylonians got useful, nontrivial, interesting mathematical results.

But I think "real maths" means proving things up to a dogmatically persnickety, seemingly insane, standard of rationality. And that seems to have begun with the Pythagoreans in Greece, about 2600 years ago.

I thought the common wisdom (not saying it's correct) was that dogs had been domesticated several times (not just twice) and most modern dog breeds are derived from a mix of different (but closely related) animals?

I can't keep track of the "common wisdom" on dogs at this point. It seems to change constantly, for reasons well-articulated in the article.

Before getting to the domestication question, I think they need to figure out exactly what they mean by 'wolf'. The lines are blurry.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coywolf

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coydog

If they can be crossbreed then the consideration of dogs, wolves, coyotes, and others representing a distinct species. Could they be just subspecies?

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