Home > Work > A Dog in the Cave: The Wolves Who Made Us Human
1 " Of all the animal species alive in the world now or in the past, only a relatively few have been domesticated by humans, most of them in just the last few thousand years of human history. The dog was the first, by a wide margin—the only animal believed to have been domesticated by itinerant human hunter-gatherers, long before the development of farming and permanent settlements. "
― , A Dog in the Cave: The Wolves Who Made Us Human
2 " And the olfactory part of a dog’s brain is forty times larger than a human’s; depending on the breed, a dog can have up to 300 million olfactory receptors in his nose, compared to about 6 million in ours. Even with that extreme superiority in equipment, dogs don’t merely smell a superstrong version of what we smell (or don’t smell); instead, they can perceive multiple layers of smell, which gives dogs a far greater range of information. "
3 " Surprisingly, studies have shown that married couples share more microorganisms with their dog than with each other! "
4 " The more we learn about dogs, the more it appears that our species’ relationship with them may have begun as one of cooperation, rather than one of dominance and submission—a true partnership going all the way back to the earliest meetings of humans and certain rather unusual wolves. "
5 " Tellingly, dogs also understand our gaze far better than our closest relative in the animal kingdom, the chimpanzee. "
6 " Though there’s no clear proof yet that one development directly caused the other, mounting evidence has led many anthropologists and evolutionary biologists to suggest that wolves-turned-dogs played a fundamental role in “domesticating” early humans just as we domesticated them. "
7 " Many scientists studying our evolutionary history now believe that social cooperation among early humans and collaborative hunting with dogs may be directly related. "
8 " There are more differences between the skulls of a Chihuahua and a collie than there are between those of a weasel and an elephant seal! "
9 " In terms of comprehending language, dogs are similar to two-year-old children. They can understand as many words but are, of course, prevented from making the next leap to human speech by the limitations of their canine anatomy, if not by differences in their brains. "
