Latest / The Smart Cookies podcast / Did we domesticate DOGS or did dogs domesticate us? With prof. Greger Larson

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Did we domesticate DOGS or did dogs domesticate us? With prof. Greger Larson · The Smart Cookies podcast

• 0:00
  Dr. Gregor Larsson is a professor in the School of Archaeology at the University of Oxford
• 0:08
  and Director of the Wellcome Trust Paleogenomics and Bioarchaeology Research Network.
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  His research interests include evolutionary genomics, ancient DNA domestication, as well
• 0:19
  as human and animal dispersal.
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  I'm going to ask you about that later because I have no idea what that means.
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  His work on the domestication of canines and the origin of the domestic dog has provided
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  insights into the prehistoric bond between humans and early dogs.
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  Professor Larsson, welcome.
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  Thank you.
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  Thank you for having me.
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  Okay.
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  Let's jump straight into it.
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  Here's the image of domestication that I believe most humans, including myself, kind
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  of share.
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  Somewhere in the distant past, we took certain animals and sort of craftily adapted their
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  nature to suit our needs.
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  Maybe we wanted them to help us hunt like dogs or we simply wanted to eat them on a
• 1:01
  sort of consistent basis.
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  However, as I listened to a couple of conversations with you, you're talking more about a relationship
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  between humans and certain animals and quite a complex one at that.
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  So what's really wrong with the simple one-sided image of domestication I described earlier?
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  Simple is great.
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  Simple is fun.
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  Simple is easy.
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  It is.
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  I like simple.
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  Simple is even better when we are kind of self-congratulating ourselves.
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  Our ancestors were smart.
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  They were goal-directed.
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  They knew what they were doing.
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  They looked around and they said, this will benefit our ancestors and our offspring, our
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  progenitors.
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  So let's do this.
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  That sounds great.
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  And then you don't need to ask any more questions.
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  We have what we have now.
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  And we have that because some smart people before us decided that's what we were going
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  to have and now we're just living with that legacy.
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  Sure.
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  That sounds fantastic.
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  The only issue with that is that there's zero evidence for any of it.
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  So there is that.
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  Zero evidence.
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  Pretty much zero evidence.
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  We layer on top of our own history a desire for control, for meaning, for purpose, and
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  then we go back and we see that.
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  Or we don't.
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  I mean, it's not there, but we see it, if you see what I mean.
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  We kind of imbue it on top of whatever record we're looking at, whether that's genetic or
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  archaeological or we sometimes just using it as a starting assumption.
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  We say this is what must have happened.
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  And so therefore let's gather the data to support that hypothesis.
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  I see.
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  So gathering data to suit our narrative.
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  Yes.
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  And if...
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  So we come up with the narrative first and then we go back and we say, oh, this is clearly
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  what happened.
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  Okay.
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  But a very simple, staying with simple, pushback could be these domesticated animals are here
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  now with us and we're kind of breeding them.
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  So I mean, that's a little bit of a proof there for the simple theory, isn't it?
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  Is it proof or is it just a statement of fact?
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  Right?
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  Yes.
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  There are animals around that we rely upon and they rely upon us to the same degree.
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  Right?
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  I mean, there's 8 billion people plus now on the planet.
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  And our species is 300,000 give or take.
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  And those 8 billion were only maybe a couple million globally about 12, 15,000 years ago.
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  So that means for the 90% of ours, more than 90% of our species history, we were just an
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  afterthought on the planet.
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  There was a couple million of us in various places, but we did not have any of these relationships.
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  So now we have 8 billion.
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  If you were to remove all domestic plants and animals from us, then that 8 billion would
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  collapse very quickly.
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  So we are just as reliant on them, some populations of them anyway, as they are reliant upon us.
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  But that doesn't mean that we or that somebody 10, 11, 12,000 years ago, whatever said, right,
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  we've been doing the same thing for the last 285,000 years.
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  So let's just change everything up and that will be better for everybody in about 10,000
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  years.
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  Let's go to evidence then.
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  Then we have the narrative and the narrative that we have is not supported by evidence.
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  What kind of narrative is supported by evidence?
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  Every animal and every plant is going to have a slightly different, there's context and
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  there's a specificity around these things.
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  So I'll just, I'll tell you why I'm skeptical.
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  If you know anything about rabbits, or if you don't, right, most people don't, right?
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  We had a chinchilla at home.
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  Is that any help?
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  It's not, but it's at least it kind of fits into the idea, right?
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  We appreciate your honesty.
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  I mean, new world, old world, I guess, or at least your age in South America.
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  So the story about rabbits that if you were to go on to say Wikipedia now or anywhere
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  else for a long time, what happens is there is this narrative that there's a papal decree
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  that happens in 600 AD and a guy named Pope Gregory decided that something called a loris,
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  which is a word that means a fetal rabbit.
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  So these are unborn rabbits in the wombs of female rabbits.
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  And those unborn rabbits are called lorises.
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  And what Pope Gregory said was that lorises were not considered meat during Lent, during
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  the portion of the Catholic calendar during which you're not allowed to eat meat.
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  On the basis of that, then a whole bunch of monks who were in Southern France and Spain
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  said, ooh, we would really, we don't like this idea of not being allowed to eat meat
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  during Lent.
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  So if this is a kind of get out of jail free card here, if this is a free pass to have
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  some animal protein, then sure, let's go grab some rabbits.
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  Let's throw them into some hutches.
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  Let's make sure that we'll wait till they're pregnant.
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  And then when they are pregnant, let's harvest those fetal rabbits called lorises and we
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  can eat those as many as we want during Lent.
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  Yeah.
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  So then they're in, there you go.
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  That's your, your, it's like a lovely just so story.
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  It's a lovely, a Freakonomics story where it's the law of unintended consequences, where
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  the Pope says it's okay.
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  Now suddenly you get rabid domestication and then we're done.
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  End of story.
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  What is interesting and I am just as much as false as anybody else on this is that the
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  first time I heard this story, I was like, wow, that seems totally plausible.
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  Like what, and then I've been studying domestication at that point for 15 years or thereabouts,
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  and I didn't even blink.
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  I just thought, okay, that's a really fun story.
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  And so my decision was, well, if we know that it's 600 AD, why don't we then try and get
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  some genomes from a variety of different modern populations and see if we can't use a molecular
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  clock analysis using some genomic techniques to try and see if that tells us that 600 AD
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  is that point.
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  I mean, and how great would that be, right?
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  We could then, we have this fact of 600 AD, that's when domestic rabbits start.
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  It's very constrained in space and time.
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  So let's see if we can recover that signal from the genomes and if we can, that means
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  the genomes have the power to prove a positive so we can ground truth it.
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  And then we can start applying it to things where we don't have a papal decree telling
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  us that we are allowed to eat certain things during life.
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  So when I, we had this idea and I had a master's student and we started looking into it.
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  And I just said, well, maybe let's just get a reference for that papal decree.
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  If it's a papal decree, I'm sure there's, I mean, it's the church, right?
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  They keep records.
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  There will be some reference to or some paperwork or some document that we can point to.
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  And it had been referenced at this point in the scientific literature, in the lay literature,
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  in a lot of popular books about domestication.
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  This whole idea was out there.
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  So it wasn't going to be hard to find.
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  So other people will have done this.
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  We just have to find the reference.
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  And Evan Irving Pease was his name and he came back three weeks later and he was like,
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  a small problem, Gregor, that papal decree doesn't exist.
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  And I was like, what do you mean?
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  Like, we can't find it.
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  It's there, but we can't get a copy of it or something is probably, and he's like, no,
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  no, no, it actually doesn't exist.
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  In fact, none of that.
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  The reason it doesn't exist is because there was no papal decree.
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  I was like, ah, that's different.
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  So then what Evan did is he went back and he pieced together the story of the story
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  of rabbit domestication.
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  And he started all the way back in the mid seventh century AD, where it's the first time
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  you get this mention of lorises.
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  And it was this guy, St. Gregory of Tours, so different Gregory completely.
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  And he mentions that one person that he knew had mentioned the existence of these things
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  called lorises.
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  All he was saying in this document was this appears to be a thing.
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  It's a delicacy in the same way that, you know, delicacies all over the world, every
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  culture will have something that everybody considers gross, but people eat anyway.
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  It's almost you kind of fetishize the disgusting.
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  So in the same way, all St. Gregory was like, oh yeah, there's this thing called the loris.
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  He didn't say anything about its popularity.
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  He didn't say how frequently people were doing this.
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  He mentioned nothing about whether people were eating this during Lent.
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  There was no nothing.
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  It was just that existence.
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  Just to mention.
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  That's just to mention.
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  Then from that point on, again, starting then in the 20th century, when people start writing
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  about this and writing about domestication a little bit more, you can see, you can follow
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  the narrative as it morphs each time it gets retold.
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  So it's like any great myth, people repeat it, but they tweak it.
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  They embellish it.
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  They add a little element to it and it goes tick, tick, tick, tick, ratchets all the way
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  up.
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  And then the crucial point happens in about, I think it was early 20th or late 20th century,
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  right around the 2000s, where there was, I think it was the Nature Conservancy website
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  made a switch between St. Gregory of Tours and Pope Gregory.
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  So the same Gregory, same name Gregory, but totally different people.
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  As soon as you say Pope Gregory, now people then repeating it from their points, it was
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  a papal decree.
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  The point is though that there was not a single, the modern story as we tell it, there's not
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  a single element that is true.
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  It's all repeated embellished fact that just gets layered upon layered all the way up through
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  its most recent retelling about 10 years ago.
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  So what's curious to me is that when we say, well, okay, what do we actually know about
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  rabbits?
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  We don't know that.
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  We don't know exactly when people and rabbits started associating.
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  We don't know when their coat colors really started changing.
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  We have some iconographic evidence for it, but we're not exactly sure where and when
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  and how.
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  We know that there's all these mentions of different relationships between people, rabbits
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  and the Mesolithic.
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  There were some sites in Portugal where people were hunting them so that they represent something
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  like three quarters of all the bones at one site were rabbit bones.
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  So people are clearly hunting quite a few of them.
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  That's not domestication, but it is an association.
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  So there is all of this myriad of interaction between humans and rabbits, which took a lot
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  of different forms, and we start to see them being moved out of their native range in the
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  sort of medieval era.
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  We can kind of trace them as they move up through Northern Europe into the UK, and then
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  they start to, they're associated with elites and then they're common and then they're out
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  and then they're invasive and now they're in Australia.
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  It just gets crazy, right?
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  It's just this complete insanity of repeating perpetual iterative cycle of a closening and
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  then a tightening and then loosening of the relationship that people have where they really
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  intensely focus on them, then they relax and they move them and then they, it's just, it's
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  all, there's a lot more nuance and a lot more insanity around it.
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  None of which involves anything to do with a Pope Gregory, a papal decree, eating Lorises
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  during Lent, or that being the moment, the smoking gun and the instant that domestication
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  happened.
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  It's almost, and so from my perspective, it's interesting, it's fascinating to me that we
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  have to, we don't, we're not even aware that we're inventing a narrative about our awareness
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  of domesticating something, right?
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  What does that tell us?
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  That tells us that we should be highly suspicious of the narratives we tell ourselves, even
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  about animals that only came into this domesticated kind of living arrangement with us in the
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  last thousand years, much less things that happened to 10, 12, 13,000 years ago or even
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  older.
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  So yes, those narratives suit us and therefore we need to be extra suspicious, especially
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  when it can be very clearly demonstrated that at least one of the major narratives has absolutely
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  zero basis in fact and no credibility for even being remotely true.
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  The issue with it for me too is that as soon as we tell that story, I bought it hook, line
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  and sinker.
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  I completely fell for it and I didn't, I didn't question it at all.
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  All I said was to the master's student, go find the reference.
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  I didn't think that it wasn't true.
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  Of course it was true.
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  And the reason I thought it was true is because it made sense.
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  And if something makes sense, you don't question it.
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  And that's the problem is that our brains are wired in such a way to perceive the world
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  in such a manner that if something makes sense, even if what is making sense is our own narrative
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  layered upon a history, which has no basis in fact, we then don't question it.
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  And therefore it leaves this giant black space where we should be asking questions and should
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  be interrogating the relationship, the timeframe, the complexity, how everything moves around
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  and what happens.
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  But we don't because somebody grabbed a couple of rabbits through them in a hutch because
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  they didn't want to not have to eat or not eat meat during Lent.
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  End of story.
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  Are you telling me that whether we're talking about cows, chickens or dogs, domestication
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  is just an empty vessel?
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  There's nothing to rely on.
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  There's nothing concrete in our hands.
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  Or do we have any sort of archaeological evidence for any of these, as you call them, living
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  arrangements?
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  Yes.
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  There are more and more people looking at this.
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  There's a lot more data.
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  The tools we have available to us now are so much better.
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  They're just so much more robust.
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  They have such greater powers of resolution, especially when combined in unison.
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  But what we're finding each time we are applying these things is that the stories we've always
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  told ourselves turn out to be either A, a lot more complicated or B, completely false.
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  So here's one of the chickens.
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  Why were chicken?
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  And it's always the question that I get asked first.
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  Why did we domesticate species X?
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  So why did we domesticate chickens?
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  We know what the answer is.
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  It's super simple, right?
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  They are the single most consumed meat.
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  They've overtaken pork globally.
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  They are, there's by some estimates, 80 billion chickens on the planet, where it's just like
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  at least 10 to one for every human, which makes it by far the most numerous vertebrate
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  and certainly the most numerous bird.
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  There's massive warehouses with tens of millions of birds that are all living very, very closely
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  together.
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  So of course, the reason that we domesticated chickens was to eat them, right?
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  That's why we did it.
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  We eat them now.
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  So we ate them then.
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  I mean, this does make sense.
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  We domesticated them and then now we eat them.
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  I mean, yeah.
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  Yeah.
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  So, and not only that, but we probably domesticated them a long time ago because they were so important.
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  We recognize that they would be a tasty meal.
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  So why would we not domesticate them as early as possible?
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  Exactly.
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  It was just when people got to where red jungle fowl, which is the progenitor of domestic
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  chickens, which is a relatively, I mean, it's a big area globally or regionally, but globally,
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  it's a relatively small area of peninsula Southeast Asia, where you get four or five
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  different subspecies of red jungle fowl.
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  People get there, they see them in the trees like, oh yum.
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  They grab them by their legs, they pull them down, they start eating them.
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  Now we've got 10,000.
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  Makes sense to me.
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  Yeah.
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  And so some of the early papers in the last decade or so have come forward with evidence
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  for very early Neolithic chickens, not just in peninsula Southeast Asia, but in China
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  and Bulgaria.
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  And it's always led by like, these were the first omelets.
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  So, you know, there's some consumption happening or there's some use of those chickens as a
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  food stuff, as a source of protein for us, because that's what we do now.
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  So, that's what we did then.
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  And that's the primary importance.
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  All this other stuff like chicken fancying, where you can grow them with really crazy
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  feathers and crazy patterns of their subspecies.
• 15:38
  That's just for like a small select group of people to make really fun calendars every
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  year.
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  So you can switch over, it says March and you get a ridiculously wild bird.
• 15:44
  Although arguably that's another kind of way in which those chickens are associating with
• 15:48
  people or another living arrangement.
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  And we didn't, it would be probably laughed out of town if you said, well, we pulled them
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  out of the trees 10,000 years ago so that we could play with their feather color and
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  show off to our friends which ones we created and give them some really fun name.
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  Right.
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  But we don't say that because we think that somehow there's a primacy of protein consumption
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  that takes precedence over any other way in which we might interact with an animal.
• 16:13
  And I don't know A, if that's true, but B, it turns out firstly that that timeframe is
• 16:18
  ridiculous.
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  And nobody really looked at it until we went, we're like, okay, big team of people, one
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  primary guy, yours, Peter's, who was like, I'm going to investigate every single chicken
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  bone and every single archeological site that has ever been claimed in any archeological
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  report or excavation.
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  And that's what he did.
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  He spent a decade doing this, just going everywhere.
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  In some cases, finding the actual bones.
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  If the bones didn't exist anymore, looking into looking at the photographs, measuring
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  everything and doing the whole context.
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  How many bones are there?
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  What's the, is, hasn't been directly radiocarbon dated.
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  What is the rest of the funnel element there?
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  What kind of farming are people doing if they're doing farming at these sites?
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  What's the likelihood that this is actually just a red or gray jungle fowl because it's
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  found in the range of the wild ancestor and not, and been misinterpreted as a domestic
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  chicken.
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  And so he created two tables, a good table of chickens.
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  We were like, those were confident are chickens based upon these dozen criteria.
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  And these that we are, if not outright dismissing, suspicious of.
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  We just want to put a very high bar.
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  It's not that they're not, but we're just, there's reasons to be worried about these.
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  So we create these two lists.
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  We then take a very conservative approach, go straight with a good table and say, let's
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  create a map then of the first appearance of chickens we consider to be good on a global
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  map and then interpolate that map with a nice color scheme that shows the earliest ones
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  in one color and then bleeding into a color that gets a bit darker.
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  And the first thing you find that far from being 10,000, the very earliest chickens that
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  there are is only about 3,500 years ago.
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  This is a very recent phenomenon.
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  Secondly, it's happening in peninsular Southeast Asia.
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  And then relatively quickly after that, over the next couple of centuries, they start moving
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  with people across Eurasia and East into the Pacific and they get to the Mediterranean
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  while the Levant and the Mediterranean say 800 BC right around that time.
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  Really?
• 18:01
  Yeah.
• 18:02
  It's very late.
• 18:03
  Okay.
• 18:04
  So what's curious about this too is, and that kind of, in some ways it fits because it's
• 18:07
  what we see in the Bible.
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  Like there's no chickens in the Old Testament, but there are chickens in the New Testament.
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  And there's a good reason to think that maybe they're not in the Old Testament because they
• 18:15
  simply don't exist.
• 18:16
  And what's really interesting to me, and this was found out through a very careful analysis
• 18:20
  with Naomi Sykes and Julia Best and a number of other people who were looking at the actual
• 18:25
  archeological context of where these chickens were found.
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  Was it full burials?
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  Were they whole skeletons?
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  Were there cut marks?
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  What else was there?
• 18:32
  What was there other grave goods that were part of this entire way in which you find
• 18:36
  the chicken?
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  And what's fascinating is that chickens arrive and for 500 years, there is no evidence of
• 18:44
  anybody eating them.
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  Nothing.
• 18:46
  Nobody is eating chickens.
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  And they not only have at this point, they've been in sort of a domestic human context for
• 18:52
  a good two plus thousand, two, 3000 years.
• 18:55
  What about the eggs that they lay?
• 18:58
  Eggs are questionable.
• 18:59
  Eggs really come to the fore in Roman times.
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  You start to see a lot more concentration on the egg.
• 19:03
  It's not to say that people aren't, but we don't find big caches of eggshell.
• 19:08
  We don't find a lot of reference to people eating eggshells.
• 19:10
  We certainly don't see this idea.
• 19:12
  And where people have inferred that chickens were laying on a daily basis, there is some
• 19:16
  reference to this in some of the earlier literature, but it's not chickens they're actually referring
• 19:20
  to.
• 19:21
  It's probably ducks in Egypt.
• 19:22
  And it's maybe it's daily or not is another issue.
• 19:25
  It gets sketchy.
• 19:26
  So for 500 years, people were just like chilling with chickens hanging out.
• 19:29
  I mean, what are we saying here?
• 19:32
  Well, there's a couple of things.
• 19:34
  So I'm sure they exist in Japan where you are now, but certainly in all major cities
• 19:38
  in the world, there's pigeons everywhere.
• 19:42
  People don't, are we eating them?
• 19:45
  Maybe some people.
• 19:46
  Are they being tolerated because they're hanging out?
• 19:48
  Yeah.
• 19:49
  Are they being actively persecuted?
• 19:50
  Well, people put like anti pigeon stuff, but nobody's that, they're probably still worried
• 19:54
  that we're trying to eradicate every single pigeon.
• 19:56
  There's a, they're kind of generally don't want them around behavior that we do, but
• 20:01
  we we've just figured out that it's going to be take too much time and effort to eliminate
• 20:04
  all of them.
• 20:05
  So with chickens, chickens are different because when they arrive, they are, they're not from
• 20:11
  Europe.
• 20:12
  They're from peninsula Southeast Asia.
• 20:14
  And when they show up, you could imagine there's no other bird that looks like this, no other
• 20:18
  bird that acts like this and no other bird that sounds like this.
• 20:21
  This is effectively an alien bird and something that is from that far away that has that many
• 20:27
  differences from what you're used to seeing.
• 20:29
  You venerate this kind of thing.
• 20:30
  This is amazing.
• 20:31
  This is effectively an alien, right?
• 20:33
  You're not going to eat the first thing you're going to do when an alien lands.
• 20:35
  Your first instinct is I'm going to eat this.
• 20:38
  Right?
• 20:39
  This is, it's got a huge amount of popular appeal given its weirdness and given how unique
• 20:47
  it is in terms of all of its characteristics.
• 20:50
  Then of course it starts getting into religion.
• 20:52
  It gets associated with the Catholic church, with the crowing and the rebirth and all kinds
• 21:00
  of other facets.
• 21:01
  You find it then, start finding it on coins.
• 21:02
  It becomes a symbol of importance and general like high status things.
• 21:07
  It's the national symbol of the whole country of France for Christ's sake.
• 21:10
  Right?
• 21:11
  Like it's, chickens were a very big deal precisely because they were so rare and from so far
• 21:15
  away and you're not eating them.
• 21:18
  What's really curious though is that archeologically what we see is about 500 years after they
• 21:23
  arrive, that's when you start to see some of the cut marks.
• 21:27
  That's when you start to start finding individual bones, which appears that they've been slaughtered
• 21:31
  for meat and people are starting to eat them.
• 21:33
  But again, even by a thousand AD, so this is now nearly 2000 years after they show up,
• 21:40
  they still are only less than 6% of the total funnel assemblage that you'll see on any archaeological
• 21:45
  site in Europe or in the UK.
• 21:48
  It only doubles to 12% at around a thousand AD when again, religiously the idea was again
• 21:55
  associated with lent or with just fasting in general was that you were allowed to eat
• 21:59
  animals that had two legs, but not four legs and that was really strictly imposed at about
• 22:05
  a thousand AD and then you start to see this increase and then it starts to pick up from
• 22:08
  there.
• 22:09
  So it's not a sudden explosive instant thing.
• 22:12
  It's a very chickens arrive, they're venerated, they're treated very differently, then they
• 22:16
  become a bit more common and it's that classic thing where if you have something that's around
• 22:23
  and you're kind of used to it after a while and you're born into a world with it, then
• 22:27
  it's no longer interesting and then you're like, oh, maybe we'll just, if we're hungry,
• 22:31
  oh, well, we could probably kill that thing and eat it.
• 22:33
  And so it's familiarity breeds contempt and that familiarity will then also maybe breed
• 22:38
  consumption because you just don't care about it in the same way that your ancestors.
• 22:42
  What I love about this story is that the clock is true no matter where you go.
• 22:46
  So when chickens first arrive into the Mediterranean, it takes 500 years.
• 22:50
  It then takes almost a thousand years for them to get up to the Northern clines of Scotland.
• 22:54
  When they first arrive in Scotland, everybody in Scotland goes, holy shit, what is this?
• 22:57
  This is amazing.
• 22:58
  People in Southern Europe are eating them, but in Scotland, this is brand new and amazing
• 23:01
  and they treat it in the same way and the clock then starts ticking.
• 23:04
  It takes 500 years for the Scots to start eating.
• 23:06
  So it's just, it's this very clear pattern of initial arrival is weird, is unique, is
• 23:12
  different and people react to it in that way.
• 23:14
  And then the familiarity comes in and then you start to eat them.
• 23:17
  But again, on a very, very small scale and they've only just overtaken pork as the most
• 23:22
  consumed meat globally.
• 23:23
  But if you look even 150 or a hundred years ago, 150 years ago, chickens were still paid
• 23:28
  so little attention to in terms of the amount of time and effort that farmers are putting
• 23:32
  into them that it was the really, especially in the U S really the purview of minorities
• 23:37
  and women who are allowed to look after chickens.
• 23:39
  All the men had the sheep, the goat and the cow and that's what they looked after.
• 23:42
  So it was just kind of an afterthought.
• 23:43
  It was a little extra money.
• 23:44
  It was a little thing that you would put on the side.
• 23:46
  So yes, we can start from the present and we can say, we eat more chickens than anything
• 23:51
  else and therefore we can leap all the way back to the beginning, claim that beginning
• 23:56
  to be 10,000 years ago and say, we started eating chickens 10,000 years ago and now we
• 23:59
  eat a whole lot of it now.
• 24:00
  The truth of the matter though is so much more complicated, so much more rich, so much
• 24:04
  more interesting and so much in antithesis of that narrative that that's what, that's
• 24:09
  what kind of haunts me, but excites me at the same time as an academic is that all of
• 24:12
  our stories are wrong.
• 24:13
  So let's go find out the true one.
• 24:15
  And what's great about it is just the degree to which we constantly make the same mistake,
• 24:20
  which is to assume that we can take the present and map it onto the past when in fact it's
• 24:24
  always changing.
• 24:25
  There's a dynamism, there's a huge number of things that play culturally, religiously,
• 24:29
  biologically, ecologically, conservation where everything is changing all the time
• 24:34
  and there's fads like anything else and animals and plants are no different than anything
• 24:38
  else that you would think about in that perspective.
• 24:41
  So it gets really, it's a hell of a lot more complicated but I just feel like it's so much
• 24:45
  more satisfying because it is actually the truth rather than this just pretend lie that
• 24:49
  we want to tell ourselves where we know everything, we're completely smart and intelligent, so
• 24:54
  our ancestors and this is exactly why we did everything was just to maintain where we are
• 24:57
  right now and it's just not true.
• 24:59
  Okay, if we switch it up, that was a crazy story.
• 25:01
  I had no idea because I had that feeling that you described earlier, the chickens are around
• 25:06
  since forever.
• 25:07
  They're just part of our diet for I don't know hundreds of thousands of years which
• 25:13
  of course yeah now that you've explained doesn't make much sense.
• 25:17
  Okay, but let's switch it up to dogs.
• 25:19
  I think, okay, first of all, I think most of my listeners will agree that this podcast
• 25:23
  is becoming renowned for asking preposterously basic questions sometimes but I refuse to
• 25:27
  shy away from admitting when I'm clueless about something.
• 25:30
  So here's the thing.
• 25:31
  That's the best way to learn.
• 25:32
  That's the only way to learn.
• 25:33
  I agree.
• 25:34
  I mean, imagine the first steps in the beginning of this quite unbelievable relationship between
• 25:41
  humans and dogs.
• 25:42
  I mean, did a couple of wolves, if we know anything about that, did a couple of wolves
• 25:46
  just figure out that humans have food all the time so they started chilling by the campfire
• 25:51
  regularly thus making themselves less aggressive or did we catch a bunch of wolves randomly
• 25:57
  and then select the more gentle ones and keep those or was it something else entirely?
• 26:01
  Do we have anything backed by evidence that would tell us something about this crucial
• 26:07
  phase between dogs and us?
• 26:09
  Right, no is the short answer.
• 26:12
  We have nothing backed by evidence.
• 26:15
  A bunch of stories again.
• 26:17
  We have a bunch of stories and some of those stories are predicated on that desire for
• 26:23
  control, right?
• 26:24
  So the simplest story is X number of thousand years ago, say 20, 25,000 years ago, a couple
• 26:31
  of people saw some wolves.
• 26:33
  We're familiar with wolves.
• 26:34
  They're on the landscape just like them.
• 26:36
  They're probably hunting the same thing.
• 26:37
  And they thought, you know what?
• 26:39
  We know where those wolf dens are.
• 26:41
  So let's go grab a couple of puppies and bring them back and maybe even breastfeed them,
• 26:45
  right?
• 26:46
  Like, but then rear them.
• 26:47
  Yes, makes sense.
• 26:48
  Rear them from a very early age because we know that if we take a wild wolf puppy, we
• 26:56
  can raise it and there'll be this thing called a dog.
• 27:00
  It's like, it just, like, think about that.
• 27:03
  If you were to do that with like a lion, which is not that dissimilar, right?
• 27:07
  Would you possibly go grab a lion cub and be like, I am confident that or a tiger, talk
• 27:13
  to Siegfried and Roy about doing that with tigers, right?
• 27:15
  Like, there's this whole, these, no, bad idea.
• 27:21
  And there's been study after study after study that have demonstrated things to do with critical
• 27:25
  period and socialization and just the way and fear responses and all this kind of thing.
• 27:30
  A reared, a hand reared, human reared wolf puppy is not a dog.
• 27:35
  These are very, very different things.
• 27:38
  And I don't care how many generations you think you get, then just to make sure you
• 27:41
  could keep them and then breed them together and keep the tamest ones.
• 27:44
  How many you got, right?
• 27:45
  What do you got?
• 27:46
  A hundred of them and you get to choose the 10.
• 27:47
  And where are you keeping them and what are you feeding them?
• 27:49
  And why this is some sort of controlled experiment where you can stake them and hold them down
• 27:53
  the whole time.
• 27:54
  Is there anything else to do?
• 27:55
  It just, so the simplest story in this case sounds great.
• 28:00
  And then when you start to put it into practice, it just, it falls apart for me instantly.
• 28:05
  The problem though, is that any story when it comes to dogs falls apart instantly.
• 28:09
  And it doesn't, it's, and that's what's so fun about this is that anytime somebody goes,
• 28:12
  oh, well, how about this idea of wolves just coming around and hanging out?
• 28:17
  And it's like, okay, but how much waste would there have to be in order to, for them to
• 28:23
  sustain that population?
• 28:25
  And wouldn't humans just immediately chase them off?
• 28:27
  These are animals that like they're competing for you on the last game and they're actively
• 28:31
  dangerous.
• 28:32
  If we, you know, how many dogs kill people in the UK right now, there's a huge thing
• 28:36
  about the bully X breed.
• 28:37
  And therefore, because there's all this press focus on attention, it seems like every two
• 28:40
  weeks a bully X is biting someone or killing someone or maiming a toddler or whatever else.
• 28:45
  But it's not just the bully X in the UK every year, there's dozens of people who either
• 28:50
  get seriously injured or killed from dogs.
• 28:52
  And we think obtain wolf is a good idea, right?
• 28:56
  So the kind of model that I like to use in this though is around the idea, like an evolutionary
• 29:03
  thing where what we see is a lot of times animals will form or go down trajectories
• 29:10
  of evolution and behavior that have a lot to do with food and that gets embedded into
• 29:17
  a culture.
• 29:18
  There's a really great example of killer whales off the Northwest coast of the Americas.
• 29:23
  So there's two main ways of living as a killer whale.
• 29:28
  You can either hunt marine mammals, seals and the like, or you eat salmon.
• 29:33
  Now the two pods of killer whales that do this, when they have killer whale babies,
• 29:38
  they train them to eat those things.
• 29:40
  And there's a, there's very different styles of hunting.
• 29:42
  You've got to know where you have to be at certain times of year.
• 29:45
  You have to be able to communicate between each other about how to get them, especially
• 29:48
  if you're chasing seals and you just, there's a, there's a huge amount of time and effort
• 29:52
  and learning that goes into procuring that specific kind of prey.
• 29:57
  The two populations are still killer whales.
• 30:00
  They're not, it's like, you know, they're effectively you and me in terms of our degree
• 30:05
  of distance.
• 30:06
  So there's nothing preventing them from mating and producing offspring, but they don't.
• 30:12
  It's a bit, it's human cultures.
• 30:13
  You know, think of the same thing.
• 30:15
  If we had to go to like Shakespeare with Montagues and Capulets, right?
• 30:19
  There's nothing stopping Romeo and Juliet except for the weight of culture around both
• 30:23
  of them or sharks and jets or whatever you want.
• 30:26
  And that is not insignificant.
• 30:28
  And so there's a good reason why there was no F1 hybrid between Romeo and Juliet.
• 30:33
  It wasn't because they were incapable of doing so.
• 30:34
  It was because their families were like over our dead bodies and quite literally our dead
• 30:38
  bodies, right?
• 30:39
  So, and similarly with killer whales, and you can see with a whole range of other animals,
• 30:43
  when you get one group of them starting to focus in on one particular resource and another
• 30:49
  group focusing on a different resource, that is the thin edge of a wedge, which will start
• 30:54
  to distinguish those two populations and start preventing gene flow between them.
• 30:58
  As soon as you start preventing that gene flow, now you can allow other things to layer
• 31:02
  on top of that to then further ratchet up the division between them and then even more
• 31:07
  reducing the likelihood of gene flow between them.
• 31:09
  So in wolves, we have this.
• 31:11
  So there are wolves in Canada, a group of wolves that follow the caribou, that there
• 31:15
  are this caribou wolves and they go up and down every year with a caribou migration and
• 31:19
  they protect those caribou from other wolves and they coordinate with each other about
• 31:22
  how to identify one that might be slightly lame.
• 31:24
  And they go after, they pick it off.
• 31:25
  They're basically always in tow of these caribou.
• 31:28
  There's other wolves in the forest in Western Canada who don't really go that far.
• 31:34
  And they subsist on a diet that changes through the year, depending on what the forest is
• 31:38
  willing to give them.
• 31:39
  So they're very good at identifying where to go when certain things are available, very
• 31:43
  much like our human ancestors were in changing climates and changing times of seasons during
• 31:48
  the year.
• 31:49
  When do you store stuff?
• 31:50
  When do you harvest stuff and where to go at certain times?
• 31:53
  Those wolves occasionally will run into each other.
• 31:55
  And again, it's very similar.
• 31:57
  They look at each other, they recognize each other as wolves.
• 31:59
  They will be sometimes even friendly with each other, but they don't mate or at least
• 32:02
  they mate very occasionally.
• 32:04
  It doesn't happen very often.
• 32:06
  So you're starting to get this thin edge of the wedge.
• 32:09
  So because of my general suspicion around top-down human-led, it was us, we're smart,
• 32:18
  we went and did everything, and the demonstration that at least with rabbits and the chickens
• 32:22
  and a host of other things, that that's not quite entirely true.
• 32:25
  I'm not saying that we weren't intentional in some ways or there wasn't some part of
• 32:28
  a human making a decision at some point, but it certainly wasn't too domesticated.
• 32:33
  Nobody pulled a chicken out of a tree to eat it.
• 32:34
  That's not how this worked.
• 32:36
  So why would it be then if you have no other domestic animals whatsoever that you would
• 32:41
  grab a wolf puppy of all things?
• 32:43
  I mean, geez, at least a lamb is not going to eat you, right?
• 32:46
  Like there's, it's crazy.
• 32:48
  So what I think is probably happening is that there is a relationship forming between a
• 32:54
  population, maybe two, maybe more populations of wolves and a group of people where you
• 33:00
  start to get this association largely driven by some sort of food stroke resource availability
• 33:07
  shared thing.
• 33:08
  I don't know what that is.
• 33:09
  I don't know what that looks like.
• 33:11
  But if you can imagine that wolves then start following those people and the way that modern
• 33:15
  wolves will follow caribou and then we become their caribou, then not only then are you
• 33:22
  severing the gene flow between those wolves and other wolves, but they're actively protecting
• 33:26
  us from their conspecifics where they don't want any other wolves associating with us.
• 33:31
  And that starts to start this ratcheting process where they're getting closer to us and vice
• 33:35
  versa, so long as that process is happening as well.
• 33:38
  But at least you have an initiation of the severance of the gene flow.
• 33:41
  Whereas if you were just grabbing a puppy and you let it go out, why would it not hybridize
• 33:44
  with something else?
• 33:45
  And then those offspring are coming nowhere near us.
• 33:48
  So I just feel like there are evolutionary models that exist that don't require the first
• 33:55
  step of being somebody smart stealing a puppy.
• 33:57
  I'm not saying that there wasn't some kind of action like that involved at some stage,
• 34:02
  but I feel like to get there, to be the very first thing through the door, it's not intentional.
• 34:07
  There's got to be something else going on.
• 34:09
  And when one possibility, and we're kind of looking into this too, is that around the
• 34:13
  last glacial maximum, 20,000 or so, 22,000 years ago, certainly in Siberia, there's a
• 34:19
  few places where there are these kind of enclaves where it appears that those regions aren't
• 34:26
  being hit quite as hard by the cold and the ice and everything else.
• 34:30
  And what you're seeing in the run-up to that is a huge drop in the populations of a lot
• 34:34
  of large mammals.
• 34:36
  And wolves are no exception.
• 34:37
  They get absolutely hammered in terms of their total population size.
• 34:40
  And paleontologically, they almost vanish off the landscape.
• 34:44
  So it could be that what you've got is a kind of climate forcing thing where you don't have
• 34:48
  a huge amount of space where everything can coexist and everything is a bit on the edge
• 34:53
  of their survivorship.
• 34:54
  And then you've got this kind of, it's almost like being forced on a blind date where you
• 34:59
  have this population of wolves and these populations, they're all just in the same place.
• 35:02
  And what are we going to do?
• 35:03
  I guess we'll just hang out for a while and you know, just maybe we'll...
• 35:05
  And then at the end of that, you may have formed this relationship, which was the basis
• 35:10
  for the process, which turned that population of wolves into dogs.
• 35:15
  And then from there, once that relationship starts, and this is what we see with the chickens,
• 35:19
  the chickens come to people not the other way around because of this wet rice, or the
• 35:24
  dry rice agriculture arrives in peninsula Southeast Asia at three and a half thousand
• 35:27
  years ago.
• 35:28
  That kind of ecological footprint involved with that sort of rice agriculture is just
• 35:34
  a huge magnet to the chickens because it looks a lot like the blooms that they saw with a
• 35:39
  lot of the other things that they were eating.
• 35:40
  So that draws them into a human niche.
• 35:42
  But once they're associated, it's the classic thing, they come for one thing and stay for
• 35:46
  something else.
• 35:47
  So the chickens came for the dry rice, but once they were associated, then it was like,
• 35:50
  oh, you got millet, you got rice, you got wheat.
• 35:52
  Sure, we'll do that too, right?
• 35:53
  But it was the dry rice that brought them in.
• 35:55
  And then once they're associated with people, the grain ceases to matter.
• 35:58
  But you need that dry rice to get them in first place because that's where they are
• 36:01
  and that's where the dry rice is.
• 36:03
  And it's the same thing with wolves.
• 36:04
  Once you have dogs, now you go through this process where you can do anything.
• 36:09
  And look at what dogs do for us now, right?
• 36:10
  I mean, nobody would have grabbed a wolf puppy with the intent of putting it into an airport
• 36:15
  to sniff drugs coming from teenagers coming back from spring break in Mexico, right?
• 36:19
  That's not why people did that.
• 36:21
  But yet that's the same kind of rationale that we use whenever we impose that kind of
• 36:25
  top down, we did it for X because Y, X and not Y or Z are a million other things.
• 36:30
  So I'm always curious and interested in what are the mechanisms that would allow something
• 36:34
  like this to happen that do not require a couple of very smart people X thousand years
• 36:39
  ago to just decide that a podcast in 20,000 years would be discussing it and they would
• 36:45
  get credit for it.
• 36:48
  How very interesting.
• 36:50
  I like the story that it all began, this great love affair began with the reluctant first
• 36:57
  date from both sides.
• 36:58
  It makes some sort of intuitive sense, doesn't it?
• 37:01
  Yeah.
• 37:02
  I mean, think about your own partners throughout your life.
• 37:05
  It was certainly a lot of reluctant dates there, yeah, from the other side.
• 37:11
  But how often is it that who chooses, who actively goes out and says, I'm going to steal
• 37:16
  you and you're going to be okay, sure.
• 37:19
  It's terrifying.
• 37:21
  But that's never romantic.
• 37:23
  That's not the romantic ideal, right?
• 37:24
  It's supposed to be a mutual thing, right?
• 37:26
  It's supposed to be two people meeting eyes across the room or whatever cliche you want
• 37:30
  to use.
• 37:31
  And that's a far more fun narrative.
• 37:32
  So why don't we apply that to our domestic animals and plants?
• 37:34
  Right, right.
• 37:35
  We should be giving agency to these things as much as we have ourselves, because frankly,
• 37:39
  neither of us had any agency in the way in which this result happens.
• 37:42
  I mean, you hear this about, people say this about love, right?
• 37:45
  You don't choose who you love.
• 37:46
  You don't choose who you have, you domesticate.
• 37:48
  Why should we?
• 37:49
  Will you concede this though, maybe in a form of a question, did any other humans or hominins
• 37:56
  have this sort of relationship or domestication from both sides?
• 38:01
  Do we have any evidence of like Homo erectus or Neanderthals living in such proximity consistently
• 38:07
  with other animals?
• 38:09
  Yeah, no, we really don't.
• 38:10
  But it kind of depends on what you're looking for.
• 38:12
  And often that's predicated upon a modern relationship.
• 38:15
  So we're looking for those signs that match the ones that we see in modern populations.
• 38:20
  So we're looking for like size change in the bones.
• 38:22
  We're looking for the male female ratios in archaeological sites.
• 38:26
  We're looking for a preponderance of a particular species, which would indicate some way of
• 38:30
  interacting them, which is different than what other populations do.
• 38:33
  So we don't really see, we see a lot of hunting with Neanderthals and Heidelbergensis and
• 38:41
  with erectus and we see stone tools and we see breaking up bones to get to the marrow.
• 38:46
  There's evidence of all of that, but forming relationships that get this far into kind
• 38:52
  of mutual interdependence, which then gets reflected in the archaeological record, it's
• 38:56
  just not there.
• 38:57
  It's not to say that there weren't relationships.
• 38:59
  I mean, clearly there's a lot of way, if you're hunting something, you need to know how that
• 39:06
  animal and how those populations of animals behave so that you can manipulate that in
• 39:10
  a particular way.
• 39:11
  And people don't just manipulate the animals, they'll manipulate the landscape.
• 39:13
  There's pretty good evidence, or so I'm told, of people intentionally burning fires in certain
• 39:19
  places and times.
• 39:20
  So not just to cajole animals into a certain place, but also then to encourage things like
• 39:25
  deer and other animals that like the early growth stuff to try and maximize the likelihood
• 39:29
  that you're going to find your prey of interest in a place and time.
• 39:32
  So people are manipulating landscapes and manipulating populations, absolutely.
• 39:37
  And not just by people, I mean sort of all of them.
• 39:40
  But when, firstly, if we say, is there any evidence of that ticking over into a domestic
• 39:46
  relationship, we have to be careful of what we mean by that.
• 39:49
  Because I think we all have an intuition around what that is.
• 39:51
  And that tends to mean things like tameness and control and things which aren't really
• 39:56
  demonstrated.
• 39:57
  And it's our intuitions that get us into trouble.
• 39:58
  Because as I was saying, we invent stories when we don't even know we're inventing stories.
• 40:02
  So I suspect that there will have been a lot of knowledge and a lot of interactions between
• 40:09
  Homo and a lot of other animals and plants, for that matter.
• 40:13
  But it not tipping over into what we would now refer to as interdependent relationships
• 40:19
  where without them, both populations suffer.
• 40:22
  And that's kind of the thing, right?
• 40:24
  Because again, if you took all people away, there's a lot of corn that's not going to
• 40:29
  grow next year.
• 40:30
  And if you take all corn away, there's a lot of people that aren't going to grow next year.
• 40:33
  So it becomes this kind of mutual relationship.
• 40:36
  But small victory for us here, I have to say, just a tiny bit.
• 40:40
  Small victory.
• 40:41
  No, I mean, there is something, I don't know if special is the right word, maybe exclusive
• 40:47
  about Homo sapiens that maybe, like you said, tipped us over.
• 40:52
  Yeah, for us to be able to participate in this relationship.
• 40:56
  We have to be careful about our language there too.
• 40:59
  Tipping over makes it sound, if not neutral, then kind of mildly positive.
• 41:03
  Like that was sort of the positive.
• 41:04
  Yes, I'll take it.
• 41:05
  Look around the world, right?
• 41:07
  What about this is necessarily positive?
• 41:08
  I feel like we what we are as a species is we problem solve on day to day basis.
• 41:14
  So we're probably we're active, we're thinking, we absolutely have communication, we do have
• 41:17
  control over some of our activities and our faculties, but we're not solving for next
• 41:23
  year.
• 41:24
  Like this is our species are very good on a short term basis.
• 41:28
  Long term thinking is not what we do.
• 41:30
  And we often we take for granted what we've got right now.
• 41:32
  So that what happens is that I think a lot of what is and there's a lot of really great
• 41:37
  literature about this, especially early agriculture.
• 41:39
  This is not people actively deciding to cut stuff down and then replant it for next year.
• 41:45
  So they had a stable resource.
• 41:46
  This is people being drawn back to that resource because they fell into it.
• 41:51
  It's an accident of becoming reliant upon something that they never wanted to.
• 41:56
  And in this way, the analogy is like your phone, right?
• 41:59
  I can't at this point in 2024, I can't do anything on my computer if I didn't have a
• 42:04
  phone.
• 42:05
  If I was like, oh, I'm going off grid, I'm not doing anything.
• 42:07
  This two factor authentication and my university means that even in my university, I have to
• 42:12
  have my phone to get a code to be able to log on to anything.
• 42:15
  Do I do I want to be this wedded to make technology?
• 42:19
  Maybe not.
• 42:20
  Do I have a choice in the matter?
• 42:21
  Absolutely not.
• 42:22
  Was it a plan five years ago to do?
• 42:23
  I didn't get a phone till what 2003 or four or something.
• 42:27
  Did I think then that, oh, yeah, now that I've got a phone, I'm going to live in a world
• 42:31
  where it's more free.
• 42:32
  Actually, no, it hems you in it pulls you in and it tightens the whole thing.
• 42:35
  So now you're absolutely constrained by the necessity of having one rather than the promise
• 42:40
  of all that was going to be possible before you had one.
• 42:43
  Okay, speaking of phones and speaking of social media, I believe you will agree that social
• 42:47
  media has become sort of a relentless pit of abuse and loading across the board.
• 42:53
  However, there is one exception.
• 42:55
  Yeah, there is one exception, though, and that's people sharing endearing pictures of
• 43:00
  or videos of their dogs.
• 43:01
  Nobody seems to be in cats, of course.
• 43:04
  Actually, have you seen this one?
• 43:06
  The ones that I find that if you're ever feeling down or you just want a good cry and who among
• 43:10
  us doesn't want a good cry, right?
• 43:11
  If you want a good cry, type in like returning servicemen dog into Google or into YouTube
• 43:17
  returning servicemen dog.
• 43:19
  Yeah, because what happens is all these people who are videoing when their husbands or wives
• 43:24
  or partners are coming from a tour of duty somewhere and they haven't seen their dogs
• 43:29
  for sometimes 18 months, three years, whatever, and they walk in the house and the dogs go
• 43:35
  absolutely apeshit in the best possible way.
• 43:38
  It's the most endearing, most loving, most like it's heartstring pulling thing you've
• 43:44
  ever seen.
• 43:45
  And it's one after another, after another, after another.
• 43:47
  The basset hound one is just outstanding because they just start howling like it's just it's
• 43:52
  outstanding.
• 43:53
  Okay.
• 43:54
  Case in point to what I was saying, nobody's impervious to that.
• 43:57
  So would you say that that cliche that a dog is a man's best friend holds some truth to
• 44:02
  it?
• 44:03
  In other words, is this relationship between humans and dogs truly exceptional?
• 44:06
  I think humans have an immense capacity for empathy.
• 44:09
  And often that empathy and that empathy can be applied to anything.
• 44:12
  So yes, a lot of people absolutely love their dogs.
• 44:14
  But jeez, talk to cat people talk to chicken people talk to pig people, right?
• 44:19
  There's chicken people.
• 44:20
  Oh my god, talk to backyard chicken people.
• 44:22
  They all have completely independent personalities.
• 44:25
  They all do really interesting things.
• 44:27
  They behave in really interesting ways.
• 44:28
  And they're smart.
• 44:29
  They know how to manipulate things.
• 44:31
  They know how to do things.
• 44:32
  And it's like they and they know how to manipulate people like they're just they're
• 44:36
  fascinating creatures.
• 44:37
  It's like anything.
• 44:38
  The more you get to know something, the more empathy you feel toward it.
• 44:42
  And the more you have a genuine kind of attraction and love and appreciation.
• 44:46
  So you wouldn't say the dogs occupy a certain privileged position here of universal appeal.
• 44:53
  You know, in South Korea only just got rid of dog farms for eating, right?
• 44:58
  And they did so at international pressure.
• 45:00
  And that put a lot of people out of work and that kind of thing.
• 45:03
  Dogs have relationships with people that run the gamut.
• 45:07
  And the majority of dogs on earth don't have names, aren't looked after, are kind of like
• 45:12
  your pigeons in Trafalgar Square.
• 45:14
  So I'm just wary of in the same way we were talking about narrative saying like all chickens
• 45:19
  came about because of X in the same way that like all dogs have this relationship when
• 45:24
  that can very much come from a very modern Western mentality of that it has to be a breed.
• 45:30
  It has to sleep in your house and it's not allowed to do any actual work.
• 45:33
  And that is a very novel, very interesting way in which dogs and groups of modern people
• 45:40
  have interacted that really doesn't have much of a historical analogy.
• 45:44
  It does seem more universal that people like furry animals like cats and dogs as opposed
• 45:52
  to tarantulas.
• 45:53
  That's like a very niche thing.
• 45:55
  You know, like even when you travel whatever continent you go to, it's very rare to find
• 46:01
  people who are like into tarantulas as pets.
• 46:04
  However, it's very common to find people who are dog lovers or cat lovers or whatever.
• 46:09
  I'm just trying to force you to say that there's maybe something else going on here.
• 46:13
  So that we feel some sort of natural affinity for dogs or cats, maybe.
• 46:18
  If we do, I think it's a numbers game.
• 46:20
  I don't think it's because there's anything inherent in those animals that is different
• 46:26
  from our capability to feel empathy and feel a love for lack of a better word toward just
• 46:32
  about anything else that we share our lives with.
• 46:34
  What is that?
• 46:35
  Was it a Rick and Morty line that all love is proximity plus time?
• 46:41
  You have something very close by for a long period of time.
• 46:43
  You're going to fall in love with it.
• 46:44
  That could be an inanimate object.
• 46:45
  But, or, you know- That does make some sense, yeah.
• 46:49
  That's what happens.
• 46:50
  Because there's a lot more dogs than there are tarantulas.
• 46:53
  You're going to get a lot more people expressing their feelings about their dogs on YouTube.
• 46:57
  I don't know that it's all, but fundamentally, I don't think it's that different.
• 47:02
  Okay.
• 47:03
  But when you see a little puppy, I always thought maybe that's some sort of evolutionary
• 47:08
  thing that they acquired to make us adopt and take care of them because they're so cute.
• 47:13
  It does seem, I'm not deciding that they're cute when I see a puppy.
• 47:17
  They're just like- Absolutely not.
• 47:19
  And I'm sure that there is, again, that kind of built-in empathy for juvenile creatures,
• 47:24
  the big eyes, the ratios of the head, the large eyes, the small, the domed skull.
• 47:28
  Right.
• 47:29
  I mean, a baby tarantula doesn't have the same effect on me.
• 47:32
  Perhaps not.
• 47:33
  But again, proximity plus time, right?
• 47:34
  I don't know if it needs to.
• 47:35
  And you can make an argument that a lot of ugly dogs get just as much love.
• 47:38
  They just had the ugly dog contest, the annual one, right?
• 47:40
  The Chinese Cresteds who just look absolutely hideous.
• 47:42
  But it goes, oh, look how ugly it is.
• 47:44
  You can still get that.
• 47:45
  It's like you can cry because something's very happy or very sad.
• 47:48
  You can have a love for something even if it's not phenotypically super attractive.
• 47:52
  A colleague of mine did a study a few years ago that was really fascinating where he correlated
• 47:57
  the timing of street dogs in Central America from when their mothers were most likely to
• 48:05
  kind of abandon them with the timing of when people thought that they were the cutest and
• 48:11
  therefore most willing to adopt them with the timing of when they were most vulnerable
• 48:16
  without human attention and it all lines up.
• 48:18
  It's really kind of, it's really interesting.
• 48:20
  So that it kind of, it behooves the puppies to look super cute just as when their mothers
• 48:26
  are ditching them and when they absolutely still need care, but the mothers aren't ones
• 48:29
  to do it.
• 48:30
  And then people go, oh, I want to adopt this and bring it home.
• 48:33
  Right?
• 48:34
  So there's this neat, there is a parallel there and there's a lot of really interesting
• 48:37
  things going on where they're kind of leveraging or weaponizing our empathy as a human to imprint
• 48:46
  upon them in the way that then they would imprint upon us.
• 48:49
  And then you're starting to form this relationship, but that's also because we know that that
• 48:52
  relationship exists.
• 48:53
  Like you might, if it was something else that, and say dogs and this wolf human thing had
• 48:59
  never really, had never emerged in dogs, then the dogs wouldn't be there for us to have
• 49:05
  this feelings toward.
• 49:06
  Right?
• 49:07
  So we have to be careful of that.
• 49:08
  Like use it's a circular reasoning to say that because we're attracted to dogs, we must
• 49:12
  have domesticated them.
• 49:13
  It's like, well, if they hadn't domesticated, we wouldn't be attracted because they wouldn't
• 49:16
  exist.
• 49:17
  It's the relationship that formed them in the first place.
• 49:19
  Yeah.
• 49:20
  No, I just passed a pet shop right now and it's always like, it's always buzzing.
• 49:26
  There's old people, young people, everybody's attracted to young puppies.
• 49:29
  They come, they come in the shop.
• 49:30
  It's always super crowded.
• 49:32
  The dogs are running immediately towards people.
• 49:34
  It just seems, I don't like the word natural, but it just seems seamless in a way.
• 49:38
  I don't know that that relationship has always been there and then the puppies are cute.
• 49:42
  So we take them and then, I don't know.
• 49:44
  Yeah.
• 49:45
  Stories, I suppose.
• 49:46
  Yeah.
• 49:47
  Good stories.
• 49:48
  And you know, it wasn't, it wasn't there for 300,000 years and then it was so.
• 49:51
  Right, right, right.
• 49:52
  Okay.
• 49:53
  Let's not forget about cats.
• 49:56
  Is the old adage that cats domesticated us to conquer the world legit?
• 50:00
  Again, if we look, one look at the internet, any internet, and I think we will have to
• 50:05
  admit a bit of a yes there, maybe.
• 50:08
  Ah, bullshit.
• 50:11
  So my issue with privileging one side of the relationship or the other, you're making the
• 50:18
  same mistake.
• 50:19
  I see.
• 50:20
  If we domesticate something that's just as bad as saying cats domesticated us.
• 50:23
  It's funny.
• 50:24
  It's a nice inversion and therefore humor, but equally untrue.
• 50:28
  Like there's, again, it's the relationship and how that relationship forms.
• 50:33
  So it always takes both sides.
• 50:35
  Is that what we're saying basically?
• 50:37
  That's my argument.
• 50:38
  And for every animal that we have really investigated, that's what's happening, which is not to say
• 50:43
  that there aren't times when people are making deliberate decisions to manipulate the population
• 50:48
  structure, but there will be a period of time before anybody's making decisions about stuff,
• 50:55
  which is absolutely critical in forming that relationship and that intentionality or that
• 51:00
  the basis for that intentionality is predicated upon a reliance upon it that would have formed
• 51:04
  without any intention.
• 51:06
  Let me, let me, I think that's clear, but probably not.
• 51:10
  So it's like, no, no, not really.
• 51:12
  So if we take, um, say cow, sorry, a cow.
• 51:18
  Yeah.
• 51:19
  Yeah.
• 51:20
  Well, so cow is a female.
• 51:21
  So that's why I thought you don't want to, you want to say cattle.
• 51:22
  So it's both, but like, yeah.
• 51:24
  So what's interesting is that the, again, the common conception is there are cows or
• 51:31
  cattle and people take them and they stake them and boom, you've got domestication.
• 51:35
  When in fact, what it is looking more like is that you already have a relationship and
• 51:41
  it may very well have been a hunting relationship, but people are following these animals, especially
• 51:46
  if they're migratory, where you're going high latitude during the summer, lower latitude
• 51:50
  during the winter and you know where these herds are going and very much like the wolves
• 51:55
  are picking off the caribou.
• 51:56
  You've got people picking off some of the sheep and the goat and they're following them
• 52:00
  around and then as people for other reasons are constrained to staying in one place, they
• 52:06
  cannot allow those animals now to keep moving.
• 52:08
  So then they start bringing them to them and that's maybe when the staking and the corralling
• 52:12
  and the, and the, and the pending them happens, but that's not happening in a vacuum.
• 52:16
  They're pending them because they're already reliant upon them and the reliance is because
• 52:19
  they've already formed a relationship with them.
• 52:21
  And that's what's really interesting to me is looking at the archeological record for
• 52:24
  evidence of those relationships that proceed the things that most people think of as the
• 52:29
  beginning of domestication.
• 52:31
  If we extrapolate this to cats, what could have happened here at the beginning of the
• 52:36
  relationship?
• 52:37
  Yeah.
• 52:38
  So we've got a fun story about this.
• 52:39
  We're still working on the paper.
• 52:41
  It's not out yet, but basically the, again, the story of cats, 10,000 now, the cats are
• 52:46
  also very, very-
• 52:47
  They're in ancient Egypt at least, right?
• 52:50
  Yeah.
• 52:51
  So Egypt is still, is Egypt is looking good.
• 52:54
  And what's curious about it is that in this case, it, without giving too much away, because
• 53:01
  we're still in the process-
• 53:02
  No, no, you can give too much away.
• 53:03
  No problem.
• 53:04
  I know we're in the process of publishing, so there's the whole embargo thing and everything
• 53:07
  else, but like-
• 53:08
  Okay, give us a little bit.
• 53:09
  Yes.
• 53:10
  So a little teaser is that if you think about the relationships and how and why they're
• 53:13
  forming, so you can get sorts of things like if red junglefowl are, they like the grain
• 53:19
  that's being harvested and so they're kind of, they're being attracted to the people.
• 53:22
  Or in the case of people, sheep, goat, and cattle, where we're kind of following around
• 53:26
  a landscape and then if we're no longer able to do that as much for other reasons, then
• 53:30
  we start pining them.
• 53:31
  Or in the case of chickens, once they get to Europe, then there's changes socially in
• 53:37
  terms of the behavior of the governments and what you're allowed to do because of the religious
• 53:42
  forcing of different dietary restrictions over the course of the year.
• 53:45
  So that's going to start altering your behavior about how you interact with animals.
• 53:49
  When you interact with them and that starts changing their population sizes and the closeness
• 53:54
  with which you are doing that, that's going to alter that behavior.
• 53:57
  And it looks like there are some really interesting things happening in Egypt around the, there's
• 54:05
  a goddess called Bess and there are people who follow her and there are temples that
• 54:12
  they go every year to and they pay an homage and they pay an homage in the form of a mummified
• 54:18
  cat.
• 54:19
  And this is requiring a huge production of cats to meet the demand for mummified cats
• 54:25
  to present as gifts to the goddess Bess.
• 54:29
  And how did they choose the cat?
• 54:30
  I mean, why cat?
• 54:31
  Why not something else?
• 54:32
  Right.
• 54:33
  So for a long time, Bess was portrayed with a lion head and then right about the time,
• 54:39
  then there's a shift, so it's still a feline, but then it gets into the North African wild
• 54:43
  cat.
• 54:44
  So there's just a cultural shift in the way that Bess is portrayed and the animal with
• 54:49
  which she is associated.
• 54:51
  And however that happens, I'm uncertain.
• 54:54
  But once that happens, people then start effectively murdering lots and lots and lots of cats in
• 54:59
  order to put them into mummified packaging so you can then deliver it like you would
• 55:03
  if you went to a church now, you buy a candle and you put it up at the front in memory of
• 55:06
  some.
• 55:07
  Not only it's a mummified cat, but in order to do so, you need a lot of cats.
• 55:11
  And so you get as this huge production for these cats that then ends up bringing them
• 55:16
  in much closer relationship.
• 55:17
  We get a much bigger population and much closer association with people.
• 55:21
  And that starts to change the way in which they're hanging out with people.
• 55:24
  And because they form that relationship, you get much closer.
• 55:26
  Then as people start moving, they start taking them with them.
• 55:29
  And now you start getting cats spreading all over the world.
• 55:31
  Wow.
• 55:32
  So it always comes down to basically proximity and then an explosion of these species and
• 55:39
  then some sort of weird social reason for their proliferation and then social becoming our
• 55:45
  pets or I don't know, food, whatever.
• 55:48
  OK, social, religious, community, connectivity, identity, all they get wrapped up into the
• 55:55
  kind of the human tornado of meaning and in so doing become important for one reason or
• 56:01
  another, and then that's when you start getting really fun stuff happening.
• 56:05
  So people going, I don't just want a pig, I want a black pig.
• 56:10
  And we have this all this really fun evidence where in three different places in the world,
• 56:14
  independently, there have been different people with pigs already who a black pig popped up
• 56:19
  and they're like, ooh, lovely.
• 56:21
  We love our penchant for novelty.
• 56:23
  So they start selecting exclusively for the black pigs.
• 56:26
  And then those black pigs start moving out everywhere and they get called different things.
• 56:29
  Genetically, they're all black on the outside, but genetically, it's all a different mechanism
• 56:32
  that gets them to black.
• 56:34
  But demonstrating, therefore, that it's three completely independent instances of people
• 56:37
  going love that black one.
• 56:39
  The other one, white we love, spotted we love, stripe you, anything that's kind of unusual.
• 56:44
  This penchant for novelty means whoosh.
• 56:46
  And if we can, we start exploring the possible space biologically and shape wise.
• 56:52
  So look at dogs now.
• 56:53
  My favorite stat from I was working with a high school student on this great project
• 56:57
  where he started looking at the Kennel Club books, the American Kennel Club books in D.C.
• 57:04
  or sorry, in New York.
• 57:06
  And the very first book that he could get was 1905.
• 57:08
  And we thought, OK, what is when you look at the breed standards, let's write down all
• 57:12
  the numbers rather than the there's lots of things like it needs to have kind of a dome
• 57:17
  skull.
• 57:18
  It's hard to measure that.
• 57:19
  So let's just go for the things that we can absolutely measure.
• 57:20
  So let's write down every time somebody said what the breed standard was in terms of its
• 57:23
  size and its height.
• 57:26
  And the biggest breed that the size that was not just allowed for, but like aimed for the
• 57:34
  biggest breed in 1905 was 100 pounds and the smallest one was 30 pounds.
• 57:39
  Now last year, the biggest one was 220 pounds and the smallest one, I think, was like 12
• 57:43
  pounds.
• 57:44
  So a standard, which is supposed to fix things, keep that in mind, right?
• 57:47
  We're supposed to say this is what it should always be.
• 57:50
  And all it does is just expand away from it.
• 57:52
  And the biggest dog in just over 100 years has now doubled in the AKC books.
• 57:57
  And that's just amazing to me because what it demonstrates is that, again, it's that
• 58:01
  hunt for novelty.
• 58:02
  It's that interesting new thing.
• 58:04
  And a lot of that is gigantism and dwarfism.
• 58:06
  And we see that in cattle.
• 58:07
  We see it in horses.
• 58:08
  We see it in cats.
• 58:09
  We're seeing it in dogs.
• 58:10
  Just name your animal.
• 58:11
  People start playing with it.
• 58:12
  One of the first things we start doing is going, we let's just see what's biologically possible.
• 58:16
  How big can we make this?
• 58:18
  How big or how small can we make this?
• 58:20
  Or how small, right?
• 58:21
  Or how short can the legs be?
• 58:23
  Or how long can its ears be?
• 58:24
  Or whatever.
• 58:25
  Let's take a trait and maximize or minimize the crap out of it or make it somewhat different.
• 58:29
  Like the cell corrects.
• 58:31
  Let's have the cats where the ears fold over because that's kind of cute and fun and recognizable
• 58:34
  instantly.
• 58:35
  Sure.
• 58:36
  There's one kitten that did that.
• 58:37
  So they backcross it to make an entire breeding line of cats that do that.
• 58:39
  Never mind that they've got all kinds of other things wrong with them as well.
• 58:42
  It's fun to look at.
• 58:43
  And then you can claim that you've got a cell correct.
• 58:45
  Great.
• 58:46
  But this is all after the fact.
• 58:47
  This is only after the relationship.
• 58:49
  That's what I mean.
• 58:50
  So these are the current stages of the relationship formed through interesting reasons, as you've
• 58:54
  rightly said, like kind of weird human societal, cultural, religious, whatever.
• 58:59
  Or hunting or some way in which these relationships are forming.
• 59:03
  Once they form, that provides the platform for us to express our own weird desires for
• 59:08
  novelty and fun with a whole variety of all the different varieties.
• 59:12
  And then they just go everywhere.
• 59:14
  Okay.
• 59:15
  I know you have to go.
• 59:16
  I have you here.
• 59:17
  You're a total expert, a scholar of these things.
• 59:20
  I need a clip for social media.
• 59:23
  So let's settle this once and for all.
• 59:25
  Which one is better, dogs or cats?
• 59:29
  I can't sit on the fence.
• 59:30
  I really want to sit on the fence.
• 59:31
  I like you can't sit on the fence.
• 59:32
  Absolutely not.
• 59:33
  Let me sit on the fence.
• 59:34
  Let me sit on the fence.
• 59:35
  There is no fence.
• 59:36
  I'm sorry.
• 59:37
  Throw rats on there.
• 59:38
  Why don't we just study on rats?
• 59:39
  Rats are fascinating.
• 59:40
  There's all kinds of crazy stuff going on with rats.
• 59:46
  The black brown thing, nobody knows about that.
• 59:48
  That's just amazing.
• 59:49
  Anyway, you're going to force me to choose between a dog and a cat.
• 59:57
  I mean, I'd have to go with the dog, I guess, but I'm very, very reluctant.
• 1:00:00
  It's like 50.1 versus 49.9.
• 1:00:03
  It's like choosing your kids or choosing your breakfast cereal.
• 1:00:07
  But you did say dogs.
• 1:00:08
  You did say dogs.
• 1:00:10
  Fine.
• 1:00:11
  If you need this essentialist, absolutely fine.
• 1:00:14
  I'm terrible.
• 1:00:15
  I'm so sorry.
• 1:00:16
  I had to do this just for the fun of it.
• 1:00:19
  This was such an amazing conversation.
• 1:00:21
  My mind is blown.
• 1:00:22
  I wish we could do this again because I have so many more questions.
• 1:00:26
  We just scratched the surface here.
• 1:00:29
  But yeah, it was a really, really cool conversation.
• 1:00:31
  Thank you for taking the time.
• 1:00:32
  Professor Larsson, do you have any social media?
• 1:00:34
  Where can people follow your work?
• 1:00:37
  I probably should.
• 1:00:38
  I left Twitter after that.
• 1:00:40
  Anyway.
• 1:00:41
  No, no, you can say it.
• 1:00:43
  Please do.
• 1:00:45
  I ethically, I'm torn with social media because exactly as you described, you said earlier
• 1:00:49
  that it's like this cesspool of hate and nastiness, but it's also a great way of connecting with
• 1:00:54
  like-minded people who share their stuff and support each other.
• 1:00:57
  Fair enough.
• 1:00:58
  I'm really torn.
• 1:00:59
  I was on Twitter for a while.
• 1:01:00
  I've never been on any of the others, but I think I'm on Blue Sky now, but-ish only,
• 1:01:06
  I don't know, mental health-wise.
• 1:01:08
  It'd be like one o'clock in the morning and my screen, I'd be scrolling.
• 1:01:12
  Right now, just email me if you want to get in touch.
• 1:01:16
  We have a website, paleo-mardon.com.
• 1:01:18
  That's a website for our lab.
• 1:01:19
  We keep it mostly up to date.
• 1:01:20
  We've got papers coming out all the time.
• 1:01:23
  I'm on the various YouTube channels doing lots of various things.
• 1:01:26
  I was a guest, not as a promoter.
• 1:01:28
  Although I've done a couple of songs that you can check out about domestic animals.
• 1:01:32
  There's a chicken song out there somewhere.
• 1:01:34
  Another one about obligate synanthropes.
• 1:01:37
  Anyway, yeah.
• 1:01:39
  Find me where you can find me and I'm happy to answer any questions you've got.
• 1:01:42
  Very last thing.
• 1:01:43
  I just saw this recently.
• 1:01:45
  There was a headless chicken that was alive for a year or something and they showed it
• 1:01:51
  around.
• 1:01:52
  How is that possible?
• 1:01:53
  I'm sorry.
• 1:01:54
  I don't know where this came from right now, but I just wanted to ask if you're familiar
• 1:01:57
  with this.
• 1:01:58
  It's quite old actually, and it's happened on a couple of occasions.
• 1:02:01
  There's also the 1920s in America, and it was in Pennsylvania, the guy who got the railroad
• 1:02:08
  spike through his head.
• 1:02:09
  I went clean through his head.
• 1:02:12
  Just because you have significant brain damage doesn't necessarily kill you.
• 1:02:17
  Usually it does, but in the cases where it doesn't, it gets interesting.
• 1:02:20
  My understanding of what happened with chicken is that they were trying to slice its head
• 1:02:23
  off, but it went a little high.
• 1:02:26
  All the basal functioning of what the brain was doing in terms of walking, breathing,
• 1:02:30
  whatever else, were all still intact.
• 1:02:33
  The chicken just retained enough of its brain matter to remain alive for a hour.
• 1:02:38
  Then of course they made sure it didn't get an infection or whatever else because they
• 1:02:41
  thought it was interesting.
• 1:02:42
  But it was only by like a millimeter, one millimeter lower.
• 1:02:45
  All right, right, right.
• 1:02:49
  What a great way to conclude the show.
• 1:02:50
  Again, thank you so much.
• 1:02:52
  This was truly a pleasure.
• 1:02:54
  Thank you.
• 1:02:55
  Yeah, it's always a thrill.
• 1:02:56
  Thank you so much for listening.
• 1:02:57
  If you liked what you heard, please consider subscribing to Smart Cookies on YouTube.
• 1:03:02
  What else is there?
• 1:03:03
  Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
• 1:03:06
  If you really like what you heard, feel free to become my Patreon.
• 1:03:09
  No, my Patreon on Patreon.
• 1:03:11
  By going to Patreon and becoming my Patreon, it's really easy.
• 1:03:16
  Just type Smart Cookies Podcast in there.
• 1:03:18
  You should be able to find me.
• 1:03:20
  Last but not least, I have to thank the absolute legends that are my producers on this show,
• 1:03:26
  my existing patrons on Patreon.
• 1:03:29
  Ida, Mancian, Micheal Medved, Medinio, Gordon, Yurechuk, Lorenzo, Mila, Carmen, Taichi,
• 1:03:37
  Moran and Veronica.
• 1:03:40
  Without you guys, this show wouldn't exist.
• 1:03:42
  So massive thanks.
• 1:03:45
  And yeah, see you in the next episode.
• 1:03:48
  Bye!