David Ian Howe
speaker
136 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
David Ian Howe’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Yeah, there's cultures where like there's endocannibalism where like you eat people within your group or exocannibalism is eating people outside of your group. But when you're eating within your group, it's kind of you can imagine like You want that person to be part of you kind of thing. And that's something that happens in different tribal cultures.
And I imagine that's probably what happened with dogs. Because a lot of dogs are... Archaeologically, when you find they were kind of in their prime, maybe a little older. So maybe they were a good hunting dog and they were eaten in that sense. Can't tell exactly if all of them are eaten. It's like only if the cut marks show up on the bones. But...
I know in definitely indigenous cultures, some puppies are eaten, or I think in Mexico culture, for sure, dogs were eaten out of respect for their sacrifice for people and things like that.
I would study stone tools or things like that or projectile weapons and stuff, but dogs are such a versatile tool. You can literally code by breeding them to do different tasks. Wow. Yeah, I find that so cool. The early tasks of hunting and guarding and stuff like that, but then if you think about... Salukis or greyhounds are meant for speed and racing, and then dachshunds burrow into stuff.
Huskies are a lot bigger to pull sleds and have that load-bearing. And then there's livestock guardian dogs, which are bigger than wolves because they have to fight wolves. That would appear, to my knowledge, after the Neolithic. There's a lot of that. After 10,000 years of them being around, you'll start seeing more...
Diverse breeds, though the standard dog probably would have looked like a dingo-like thing with that standard yellow coat. Not a wolf, but not a dog. If you think of ancient Mexico, they had the Chihuahua, the Shillet's Quintly, all sorts of different dogs. But the modern breeds we have is definitely like a Victorian era thing where they became a status symbol.
The wealthy could have very specific dogs. And even in Rome, if you were a wealthy Roman citizen, you could import a fancy Egyptian greyhound and show it off. Even back then.
Yeah, like specific niche breeds.
Two things from the anthropological, like zoological perspective. Are dogs more beneficial to humans than not? Do you need to waste extra calories feeding the dogs or do they help you get more calories like in a hunter-gatherer setting than you would without them? That kind of varies depending on where you're at in the world and that's debated.
But that was interesting to me to see how different that can be.
But mainly through the anthropology, like cultural aspect, just seeing the sheer amount of creation stories and mythologies and oral traditions of different cultures in which dogs play a role in creation. or are there present in creation or have to do with the afterlife. Yeah, like Anubis in Egyptian mythology, when you die, he's the first one that meets you and he kind of greets you before.
He's like your chaperone to get to the rest of the gods in the underworld. And he holds that scale. A dog is judging your soul, like were you a good person or a bad person, which I find great. And then of course, the three-headed dog in Greek mythology, he keeps people in and out of the underworld, he guards it.
And in Mexico mythology, like a dog waits for you across the river in the first land of the dead, and then it will help you like navigate you through the lands of the dead so you don't have to do it alone.
And that's very common, like different versions of that myth, especially in the Americas.
Yeah, I would think so. It was so fascinating to me that dogs are just so intrinsic to human life and so symbiotic that it's not even a question. They're just part of the stories. In the Egyptian sense, I read a paper trying to figure this out, and jackals like to scavenge tombs and graves and things like that.
And in the Bible, it always says they were fed to the dogs or left them for the dogs or left them for the wolves. They always scavenge death and like dogs came to be because they were scavenging bones around our camp. So it makes sense that we would associate them with some kind of like, it's called a psychopomp, like something that guides you to the afterlife.
Dogs are so crucial to human nature and culture now that it would make sense that if there was some kind of afterlife, dogs are there.
Yeah. Obviously, chimpanzees and bonobos are our closest relatives in terms of genetics, but wolves are so socially intelligent. They show their teeth, they roll over, they wag their tail, they have different barks, and they're monogamous to an extent. Close enough. So early humans would have noticed that. and probably felt some kind of kinship with the wolf in that sense.
But over time, the reason we could interact with each other so well was because we're so social and dogs would have picked up on our social cues with their eyes and stuff as well. If you think of a pug, it's basically bred to look like a human face. It's flat and they have the big eyes. So over time, it became advantageous for dogs to understand our eye movements and like it was bred for.
on its own as a side effect of being heavily bred to be around people.
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