Dogs are man's best companions, so why not chickens or ducks? Have you found that with the abundance of material life, more and more people have adopted pets, of which dogs can be said to be the first choice of many people.
Dogs were ancestors of wolves, and their DNA sequences were as similar as 99.8 percent. How did the ferocious wolf get domesticated by humans step by step, until they finally became their best friend?
For people, dogs can be their companions, protectors, playmates, herders, and even the winter self-heating blanket.
To explore the question of when dogs were tamed, we'll go back in time to that distant time. Travel back to the Ice Age when Homo sapiens first encountered Neanderthals in Europe. Scientists generally believe that Europe was the first place to tame dogs, but Neanderthals never domesticated dogs, preferring to hunt large and medium-sized herbivores, such as deer, directly.
About 40,000-50,000 years ago, when Homo sapiens first left Africa to reach Europe, they met Neanderthals and began to survive and reproduce on the continent. Homo sapiens initially chose canids to hunt larger and fiercer prey through long-term, mutually beneficial partnerships with canines. Scientists believe that the survival advantage of Homo sapiens through canines may have accelerated the extinction of Neanderthals, of course, this claim is still controversial to this day.
In the process of the gradual evolution of wolves into dogs, there will be a transition period, such as "wolf dogs", which are different from modern dogs, but have become different from wolves.
Mietje Germonpré, an archaeologist at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels, has found skulls and teeth of canids dating back 36,000 years at archaeological sites in Belgium, the Czech Republic and Russia, and these earlier "canines" are likely to be just a subspecies of gray wolves.
Scientists tend to believe that humans began domesticating dogs around 16,000 years ago. After all, for the earliest dog fossils, we can't accurately determine whether it is a dog or a wolf by anatomical features.
It is impossible to judge by anatomical characteristics, and scientists can only rely on the nuances of DNA, changes in animal diets, and cultural shifts in humans. For example, 14,000 years ago, at the Bonn-Oberkassel historical site in Germany, the burial of people and dogs was found.
There is evidence that wild dogs in Australia were introduced 5,000 years ago, and no connection between Australians and dogs has been established before. Later, they kept the wild dog cubs as pets and saw them as companions and guardians against humans or supernatural creatures.
Studies of the earliest Americans also show that they do not seem to have any connection with dogs. The earliest dog trail found was a femur fragment from Alaska, only 10,000 years old.
The taming time of the dog seems to have a very close relationship with the time of the appearance of Homo sapiens on the earth, and from the perspective of history, the dog has accompanied Homo sapiens through many rises and falls of honor and disgrace, and to some extent even helped the development of human society.
Early dogs still retained the wild nature of wolves, but they were also friendly to humans, had excellent sense of smell and hunting ability, and were able to help humans survive the harsh living conditions. We can say that in the early days, dogs, as a tool for human survival, entered human society and accompanied the continuous evolution and development of human beings.
In historical experience, chickens and ducks seem to be unable to provide added value to humans other than the function of satiety. For example, like horses, in the era of wars and chaos and there was no means of transportation, human beings also formed a strong relationship with them, so everyone will find that horse meat is also very uncommon in life.
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