Baboons raise dogs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=7I7-SADai3Y


This is fascinating. Could domestication of dogs have occurred before we evolved into Homo Sapiens? I have often wondered this was the case as I see dogs as an integral part of Human hunting and Gathering societies. I believe the domestication of the dog allowed Humans to move into areas where large predators such as the short faced bear or the cave lion etc were dominate.

I think it's an interesting concept. I've run across a little information on this, but am working from memory which isn't the most reliable.

One of the ways paleontologists distinguish dogs from their wolf ancestors is in the relative sizes of their teeth. Some of dogs' teeth, I think it may be the molars IIRC are a little smaller relative to the front teeth compared to wolves. Or I may have it backwards. The first appearance of this trait in the fossil record is about 14,000 years ago or maybe a little more. This also roughly coincides with the first appearance of the remains of small tame wolves/dogs in human encampments. Early dogs were found at Oberkassel (sp?) Germany along with human remains at the beginning of the 20th century, and the remains are around 14,000 years old.

There is evidence of domesticated small wolves in the Pavlovian culture in Eastern Europe around 25,000 years ago, but the website I got it from doesn't say exactly what that evidence is. There is a lot of info on the Upper Paleolithic in Eastern Europe at this excellent website:

http://www.anthropark.wz.cz/aagalery.htm

I posted this a couple of years ago at DC and still like to visit it from time to time.

Anyway, I don't recall reading about any evidence for the existence of domesticated dogs with archaic humans. They may have domesticated dogs but so far nothing has turned up in the fossil record yet that I'm aware of.

I rather doubt it. First, the dogs are already dogs, not wolves where they would not only need to be domesticated, but also selected for certain traits. It appears to me to be more a mutualistic situation, and that is interesting just by itself.

A few years ago I read an interesting article on this subject. The article asserted that it was dog who sought out man and is really the only animal to voluntarily "pack up" with man. My memory is a bit sketchy but it seems that dogs lived on the peripheral of man's encampments and followed them during some migrations, likely as a source of easy food, carcasses, scraps and by-products discarded by man. Man noticed value in the dog early on as an alarm for intruders and a layer of defense as the dogs weren't fond of sharing their food source with animals from outside the pack. Dang, I wish I could remember what magazine that was.