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"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title. Do you have funny and adorable videos or pictures of your pet you want to share? They offer animals and plants an advantage in evolutionary terms as they help them anticipate and prepare for regular environmental changes. If you always come home around the same time, your dog may rely on his circadian rhythm to roughly predict when you are about to come home. As we already know, dogs are very tuned in to the slightest changes in their environments and they easily pick up even the most subtle cues.
The earliest named hominid species, known from fossil remains, are Australopithecus ramidus and Australopithecus anamensis, dating back over 4 million years. The first stone tools were used about 2 1/2 million years ago, and signs of meat eating appear about a million years later, around the time that Homo erectus spread out of Africa into Eurasia (Figure 1.1). The first cave paintings, including many of animals, appeared about 30,000 years ago. The agricultural revolution began about 10,000 years ago, and the first civilizations and written scripts about 5,000 years ago. But in spite of all this exploitation, abuse, and neglect, many people form bonds with animals from childhood onward.
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Young children are commonly given teddy bears or other toy animals, and they like hearing stories about animals. An interesting explanation as to how dogs may predict their owner's arrival might come from how long the owner's scent lingers since he leaves the house. According to a paper published in the journal Current Biology, dogs are capable of emotional tears, especially when seeing someone they are very fond of.
Shamans experience themselves as being guided by animals or as changing into animals, understanding their language, and sharing in their prescience and occult powers. In this chapter I explore the evolution and the nature of human-animal bonds. He castigates traditional scientists for their refusal to countenance anything that doesn't fit in with their existing paradigms and challenges them to come up with some more "acceptable" explanation--but none is forthcoming. These intriguing questions about animal behavior convinced world-renowned biologist Rupert Sheldrake that the very animals who are closest to us have much to teach us about biology, nature, and consciousness. "We had never heard of the discovery that animals shed tears in joyful situations, such as reuniting with their owners, and we were all excited that this would be a world first," said Kikusui.
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In the case of Rupert Sheldrake's latest work, the controversial content is right on the front cover. Conditioned by the tight rigor of contemporary scientific thinking, we either look for rational explanations or we file the phenomenon away in our minds as "unexplained" and are careful not to talk about it with our scientist friends. Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home not only provides fascinating insight into animal, and human, behavior, but also teaches us to question the boundaries of conventional scientific thought. This remarkable book deserves a place next to the most beloved and valuable books on animals, such as When Elephants Weep, Dogs Never Lie About Love, and The Hidden Life of Dogs. Additionally, the authors hope to test whether dogs produce tears in response to negative emotions, and if the dogs cry happy tears when they reunite with other dogs, which would have implications on dog socialization as well as domestication by humans.
If this theory is confirmed, it means that our ancient companionship with dogs may have played an important part in human evolution. Dogs could have played a major role in the advances in human hunting techniques that occurred some 70,000 to 90,000 years ago. Our ancestors lived as gatherers and hunters, with gathering far more important than hunting.
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The conventional view is the domestication of wolves began between 10,000 and 20,000 years ago. But recent evidence from the study of DNA in dogs and wolves points to a far earlier date for the first transformation of wolf to dog, over 100,000 years ago. This new evidence also suggests that wolves were domesticated several times, not just once, and that dogs have continued to crossbreed with wild wolves. Finally, sometimes we stumble on things that are unexplainable even when it comes to science. Take for example the behavior of Jaytee, a mongrel terrier who has shown the uncanny ability to anticipate the owner's arrival up to half an hour prior, or even more.
"Unlike any other animals, dogs have evolved or have been domesticated through communication with humans and have gained high-level communication abilities with humans using eye contact," wrote the authors in the paper. An additional finding of the study was that the dogs' tear volume increased further when an oxytocin solution was applied to their eyes. This suggests that oxytocin—a bonding hormone produced in the human body after childbirth and falling in love—might mediate tear secretion during an owner-dog reunion.
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Scientists have found that dogs produce more tears by volume when reunited with their owners compared with non-owners. The Australian veterinarian David Paxton goes so far as to suggest that people did not so much domesticate wolves as wolves domesticated people. Wolves may have started living around the periphery of human settlements as a kind of infestation. Some learned to live with human beings in a mutually helpful way and gradually evolved into dogs. At the very least, they would have protected human settlements, and given warnings by barking at anything approaching.
Formal investigations into happy tears in dogs and other animals haven't been done much before, however, animals have been anecdotally observed to show signs of joy or excitement when their owners come home, such as by wagging their tails and running around erratically. Their ancestors, wolves, hunted in packs, just as men hunted, and from an early stage dogs were used in hunting as well as for guarding human settlements. The researchers performed something called a Schirmer Tear Test on a group of 22 dogs, which involves measuring the animal's tear volume. They found that the amount of tears produced by the dog's eyes increased significantly when they were reunited with their owner compared to someone who they were familiar with but wasn't their owner. "Dogs have become a partner of humans, and we can form bonds," Kikusui said in a statement. "In this process, it is possible that the dogs that show teary eyes during interaction with the owner would be cared for by the owner more."
It's therefore no surprise if dogs could also pick up "pre-arrival" signs from those around him. Discover more about how this relief can put a dent in your best potty training goals. However, the sample size used in this study is pretty small at a meager 22 dogs, so more testing at larger scales would serve to consolidate the findings. The wolves that evolved into dogs have been enormously successful in evolutionary terms.
Dogs get so emotional when their owners come home to them that they cry tears of joy, scientists have found. In hunter-gatherer cultures, human beings do not see themselves as separate from other animals but as intimately interconnected. The specialists in communication with the nonhuman world are shamans, and through their guardian spirits or power animals, shamans connect themselves with the powers of animals.
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