History Of Dogs Essay

are a kind of wolf. They were the first animals that people fed on purpose, earlier than sheep or cows or chickens. People have been taking care of dogs in Central Asia since about 13,000 BC, in the Stone Age, before the beginning of farming (and possibly much earlier; maybe as long as 100,000 years ago, before people left Africa). Most likely, dogs themselves began this relationship by hanging around people's campsites (there weren't any villages yet), trying to snatch some of their garbage to eat. At first, people must have tried to scare the dogs away. But after a while, some of them realized that the dogs ate rats, and also helped to clean up food garbage that drew flies and other insects. So campsites with dogs were cleaner and healthier than campsites without dogs. Fewer people got dysentery and died.

DOGS

HUNTING

CATS

SHEEP

HORSES

NAVAJO DOGS

The people who lived in these cleaner campsites grew up stronger than people who shooed away dogs, and there were more of them. Eventually, the dog-lovers pretty much took over, all over the world. And dogs evolved to be able to digest more and more people-garbage, especially grains.

Somewhere around this time, people probably began to see that the dogs could do other things too. Dogs would bark and let you

It turned out that dogs could also guard sheep, and help to herd the sheep when you were moving them from one pasture to another. Some people ate dogs, especially in China. You might think of those dogs as a great way to turn garbage into food. Even in places where people usually didn't eat dogs, like Europe, dogs provided an emergency source of food when there was a famine. If you were starving, you had to kill and eat the village's dogs before they decided to eat you (and then there would be a lot more rats than usual, without the dogs to eat them, and you would live on the rats for a