00:00:03 Speaker 1: Hey, everyone, Welcome to Houndations. I'm your host, Tony Peterson, and this first episode is all about our relationship with dogs and how that came to be. Look, I'm of the opinion that we all want a better relationship with our dogs, but we might not know how to get there. You know, that's kind of the gist of this whole podcast concept, honestly, But it has to start somewhere, and I don't think there's a better place to begin than trying to understand just you know, how our coevolution with wild canines came to be and what that means, not only for us but for our dogs. It's a fascinating story, complete with a hell of a lot of mystery. But what it does reveal our clues to how lucky we are to have dogs, and how much better we can understand them once we know where they came from and what makes them tick. Now, there's a lot more to this than most people think, and it's what I'm going to talk about, right freaking' nowl I read a quote recently that said most humans are far more comfortable with unquestionable answers than unanswerable questions. We don't like the thought of not knowing what happens to us when we kick the old bucket, So it's comforting to believe that we are about to get a sweet new robe and float around on some clouds for eternity. With all of our old relatives and pets, we tend to develop worldviews that fit mostly with what we can know or what we have been told from a young age. We like answers, and we like working with parameters that make sense to us. Our brains are good at imagining distances we can walk, but not so great at imagining distances that stretch way beyond the limits of an evening stroll. Take a light year, for example. This phrase gets thrown around a lot by space eight geeks like me and you know, normal folks alike. But what does it mean? Well, In short, in a vacuum, light travels one hundred and eighty six thousand miles every second over the course of three hundred and sixty five days. That distance equals roughly six trillion miles. Think about that the next time you see a clickbait article on how NASA might have found an exoplanet that could be suitable for humans and it's only forty light years away. Because that's forty times six trillion if you want to get that distance in miles, and might as well be an infinite number as far as us ever getting there and figuring out if we can start building vacation homes and Starbucks and stuff. We can't really wrap our brains around distances like that, but maybe that's an extreme example. Take your beloved four legged friend. You might think of him as a three year old lab or German short hair pointer, or a huskier, a chihuahua, which, if you want to pronounce it correctly, sounds like chiehuahua. After jokes like that, I like to wait a second so the folks who want to send me an angry email telling me how uninformed I am can start looking up how to contact meat eater. That lovable hound of yours might be a couple of years old, but she's also somewhere between fifteen and forty thousand years in the making. That span exists because archaeological sites with hard evidence put dogs in humans working together back to about the fifteen thousand year mark. The forty thousand year mark is more of a guess, but it's an educated guess on how long ago the first steps of domestication likely started now. If you try and imagine what life on Earth will be like in fifteen thousand or forty thousand years from now, you probably can't. It's just too far. And the people who are alive in that time span, you know, if people make it that far, which seems like a big if these days, they're going to look back on us the way we look back at cave men and women. Now. Now, if we could somehow break from the fourth dimension that is time, and reverse course for at least fifteen thousand years, we'd also see a world largely alien to us. And that's a good place to start the story of modern dogs, provided you want to ignore the millions of years of evolution that led up to the wolves, which I do because it doesn't do us any good for the show. Right now, we have an idea in our head. You know, some hairy fellow with a fresh kill, likely a prey species that doesn't exist anymore, you know, sitting next to a campfire somewhere, roast and chunks of meat, while wolf eyes glow at the outer edge where the light meets the darkness. Maybe at first he took advantage of the bountiful calories and tossed a bone or a chunk of tissue or venison toward the wolves. We know canines are big fans of food, and that act alone could have started the journey of us and dogs. The other possibility is that old Grug and Aug were out scrounging around for some breakfast and found a wolf pupp or two you know, sitting outside their den, howling pitiful howls for mama, and they picked them up and brought them back to the cave to show the kids. Either as a possibility, and both could be true. There's also an argument to be made, and it has been made by canine researchers, that it wouldn't make any sense for a hunter gatherer to grab a wolf pup and try to raise it to be doglike. We can't fully do that with wild wolves today, and we have a hell of a lot more knowledge and free time than they did. There's even an offshoot theory of that that's gaining more traction. And now I know I'm going off on a lot of tangents here, but this one's kind of cool, and it's the one that points to the possibility that women may have played the primary role in encouraging wolves to hang around for a handout. If you think about it, while the hunter gatherer lines are a lot more blurred than they used to be, it would make sense that if men primarily set out to hunt and women primarily stayed home to forage and raised the youngsters, trading some meat for a guard dog would be a hell of a good idea. Now, I don't know if this question is unanswerable, but I'm starting to understand why we lean into unquestionable answers. How this whole thing came to be is a mystery, but it did come to be, and to modern humans. It's easy to think of a single event starting the coevolution of us and canines, but it seems clear that it's a lot more complicated than that. Scientists first mapped a full canine genome in two thousand and five, which was supplied by what I can only guess was a very good girl named Tasha who happened to be a boxer. In this process, researchers try to decipher a bunch of clues as to where domestic dogs came from and how they came to be what we know of today now. One of the things scientists have figured out is that our domestication of dogs didn't follow the exact path that it did with say, pigs or sheep goats. With pigs, for example, genes show that breeding between domestic animals and wild hogs was rampant for a long long time. Ditto for sheep and goats, but not dogs. The working theory, and it's better than anything I can come up with, is that humans had a special relationship with dogs right from the jump. It wasn't advantageous for them to have a dog that went out and had a conjugal visit with a wild wolf, because that would halt or at least slow down the progress of dogs becoming more and more bidable and friendly, more like the kind of pet we want. Interestingly enough, one way this process didn't really differ from animals that were probably more likely to be food than four legged security guards is that domestication seems to produce tamer behavior and curly tails and floppy ears and generally smaller braines across multiple species. It's like domestication kind of sets genes to default to cuteness mode, the unraveling of dog genomes to piece together a fuller picture of how they came to be our best friends is ongoing with the big brains at Cornell University looking at dogs from various villages in Africa to see what they can learn and to see how it will all tie together with other genomes and archaeological findings. This is something that's easy to be dismissive about, but it's actually pretty incredible, kind of like how we can use the James Webspace telescope to look back in time to at least close to the beginnings of the universe, or how we can use it to see stars and galaxies in various states of growth or decay to understand how the process happens. The DNA from domesticated dogs throughout the world, along with the DNA from various wolf species, tells us a lot like that It lets us look back in time. It tells us things like that some species of wolves carry a tiny bit of domestic dog DNA, but modern dogs don't carry the wolf DNA. That points to the fact that I just mentioned about how it likely wasn't advantageous to take the early dogs and their path toward becoming the dogs we know today and slow it down or reverse it by letting an untrainable canine contribute to the soup that makes the next generation. This history is evident in other ways too. Take the dingo, you know, the Australian wild dogs that have a pensiant fornomming on babies. They provide a genetic snapshot, complete with a time stamp, of when they first left New Guinea with humans as pets, and how they eventually crossed a land bridge into Australia where they rewilded themselves in the outl back. So they went from wild to somewhat domesticated to wild again, which is all written deep in their genes. There are other ways Mother Nature reveals this curious case of coevolution to us modern humans, like how somewhere along the way, before we even figured out basic agriculture, we started burying our dogs on purpose with intent. In fact, in multiple locations, the burials of dogs seem to have pretty much been on par with the way they buried humans, which is something that's wild to think about. As important as we view our dogs today, our predecessors, at least some of them, seem to have felt the same way. Now, not all of the dog remains show a pleasant burial of a good boy. Plenty of sites show that dogs were used as a food source, which is no surprise. Some show signs of ritual sacrifice, which isn't much fun to think about, even though we know that humans were the source of play any of sacrificial offerings. Yet for some reason that doesn't bother us as much, and I bet you can't really say why. Those archaeological digs with canine remains reveal some interesting stuff about our coevolution, with the sites from about twelve thousand to fourteen thousand years ago showing enough genetic differences from wolves that researchers are very confident they are looking at domesticated dogs. They also had morphological differences like wider eye sockets and shorter faces. Burial sites in Israel and Germany and Tunisia and Sweden highlight further our relationship with dogs. Old dogs or dogs with severely advanced conditions like distemper have been recovered, which shows signs of being cared for even when they were decrepit or ill. The Israeli gravesite contains a woman's remains with her head laying right next to a pup, as if they were placed together. This happened about twelve thousand years ago, so it's impossible to say for certain if that was the intention. But people smarter than me, who also happened to investigate the site firsthand, believe it to be true. That's good enough for me. Some dog corpses have been found with grave goods just like humans. Deer, antlers, pieces of flint, and other things that had real value have been found with dog remains in a way that speaks to intention and not coincidence. Through the fully mapped genones of more than two dozen wolves and dogs, we now know that by about eleven thousand years ago, there were five different lineages of dogs spreading throughout the world. Unlike domestication of other animals, this kind of makes sense. It's easy to get a dog to go where you go generally, not so much when it comes to a herd of half wild cows. Now, while it seems like old school pupsters must have covered the land in lockstep with humans, the genetic story doesn't always match ours, which keeps the mystery of exactly where and when domestication happened alive and well. Their story doesn't parallel our migration story as tightly as you'd expect. So it leaves a lot of those pesky unanswered questions that we don't have the answer to yet, but a lot of people are looking for them. Now, fast forward if you will, about I don't know, ten five hundred years from there, which is really glossing over a lot, I know, but take into account the beginnings of a breed many of us love dearly, which is the Labrador Retriever. The lab story is one that is unique but also kind of not sure. The specifics are unique to the breed, but the general usefulness of a dog in a certain situation, mixed with a specific geography tends to produce a newish breed of dog from time to time. The lab story highlights this quite well. About five hundred years ago, there they were Spanish, French, Portuguese, and English fishermen sailing around the Canadian coastline, many of whom ended up in Newfoundland. Those sailors from various corners of the world brought dogs with them, and on the island of Newfoundland, they did what dogs do, and they co mingled. Out of those canine trists eventually appeared to Saint John's dog, which came in a couple of sizes, with a smaller one developing a serious affinity for water while simultaneously becoming pretty useful to humans, many of whom weren't nearly as fond of retrieving dead fish between their teeth while swimming and freezing cold saltwater. Those dogs learned to die for fish, retrieved fishermen's hats that had blown into the swells, and could even die for cod that had flipped off the hook and were trying their best to get back into the safety of the depths. Fishermen at the time had plenty of dog options, but given the frigid conditions, they bred for the shorter coated dog to keep them ice free. Now imagine that you're a dog with a long coat to keep you warm, and some assholes decide to take your bloodline and essentially force you to live with a hooded sweatshirt versus a down filled parka, all while asking you to jump into thirty four degree water all day long. Those dogs were black with white markings on their face, chest, and feet. Today you still occasionally see labs with white chevrons on their chest, but they aren't as popular as solid coated dogs because most people think they aren't pearbred. The first labs were so good at retrieving things in the water that fishermen were inclined to show off their skills when they were back at home, which led to a market for them. Breeding ensued, and when they made it back to England, they eventually became the first batch of ingredients for what would become flat coats and curly coats. Over a couple hundred years, the Saint John's dog would disappear completely and the Labrador Retriever would become what it is today, a sporting breed that is almost universally loved and is used for so much more than retrieving something in the water, although if that's a core component of why you want a dog, you'd have a hard time finding a better choice. Their jobs vary from sniffing for illegal narcotics at the airport to keeping people calm when they're about to have a panic attack, you know, to helping the sightless navigate the world safely, to so much more. And that's just one breed. Maybe it wasn't as important to our survival as a species is figuring out how to chip certain stones into crude arrow or spearhead, or how to summon the light of the sun and a small batches from a piece of flint to create a fire for warmth and security, and the opportunity to make more food more useful to us. Maybe it wasn't as beneficial as looking at a weed like maize and over time developing corn. Or the first human who probably didn't understand how easily his spine could snap in two, who happened to probably on a dare, hop on the back of a wild horse and hold on to its main until it finally stopped bucking. Maybe there were more important advances in human understanding and technology along the way throughout our history, but it sure seems like the blending of man and beast in what was surely one of the first harmonious times that happened, changed the course of our existence for the better. While that's pretty cool in and of itself, it's also worth understanding as a dog owner and a dog lover, and yes, as a dog trainer, which you might not think you are. But if you are a dog owner, then that's kind of your default setting, whether you acknowledge it or not to understand, at least on some basic level. The sheer volume of years Tucked into our coevolution with dogs, along with the importance of their predecessors to ours, is to peak behind the curtain on how to have a better relationship with your dog today. Our largely symbiotic relationship has set the stage for not only the lovable pets we have to, but for what we can do with them and how we can forge a better path forward, whether that's in a duck blind with a lab or in a crp field with a short hair, or just about anything. In everything we do with our four legged besties on a daily basis, their history is ours, and it informs how we choose puppies, how we train them to sit or stay, or do double blinder trees in a national field trial championship. It tells us, as if we need a reason why it's so easy to swipe the credit card when our dogs need some veterinary care, or why it rips from us a piece of ourselves when their criminally short lives come to an end, and we can empathize with those folks of a past life who bury their dogs in just such a way as if they were sleeping and with a dear antler to chew on as they run nose to the ground into the afterlife to wait with wagging tails for us to join them eventually. Look, all I'm saying is that dogs are badass, and once you start to understand how they got to be what they are, you understand how we got to be what we are too. That knowledge helps us be better together, although it mostly tell us a little bit about how to work with our dogs to ensure that they know what we are asking and in return, they know how to ask us for something. Now, I hope you've enjoyed this podcast and that you come back for more, because the next episode is going to leave the past behind and focus on the present task of learning how dogs communicate with us and how we should communicate with them, which goes way beyond just giving them a command and hoping they understand it enough to give us the desired behavior, which is really the foundation scratch that the houndation of having a great relationship with your dog. That's it for this week of Houndations. I'm your host, Tony Peterson. I just want to say thank you to every single person who tuned in for this. We hear a meat eater truly appreciate your support. It means the world to us now. If you want to get some more info on dogs or white tail hunting, or trapping beavers or whatever, you can head on over to the mediator dot com to check out all of our video series and our podcasts, our articles. Maybe you'll find a new recipe there you want to try out. Maybe you want to go shopping and treat yourself at the Mediator Store. Whatever, go to the mediator dot com and check it out.

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