August 31, 2021 • 53 mins
From dogs in old paintings that look like dope smokers to Aztec psychopomps, what’s with all these fire dogs? In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe explore…
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
My welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, the production
of My Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick,
and today we got an art question to start off with. Uh,
(00:21):
have you out there? Have you ever been wandering through
a museum and looking at old paintings, especially maybe paintings
from the medieval Europe or from the Renaissance period, and
you happen to come across a dog holding in its
mouth maybe what looks like a big, old rolled up
newspaper that's on fire, or as as many people on
(00:42):
the Internet have characterized it, smoking a joint or smoking
a hand rolled cigarette. You know, I have to admit
that I had I had never noticed this before, and
I'm I'm not an our expert by any stretch of
the imagination, but I feel like I've I've walked through
a number of really good art museums. I I've enjoyed
in the past diving into sort of detail oriented topics
(01:07):
that involve paintings, and yet I have never witnessed the
joint smoking dog or the firebrand bearing dog before until
it was brought to my attention by an an art
net dot com blog post or article that we were
talking about, right, So, I don't know how you came
(01:27):
across this, but you were the one who sent it
to me. And this was a blog post by an
American art critic named Ben Davis. Uh. That's very funny,
and it is addressing the question of why are there
so many medieval and Renaissance paintings that depict what looks
like a dog smoking a joint. That is the way
the author phrases it, and it's it's quite amusing because
(01:49):
it includes images examples of this and when you start
looking at them, yeah, it looks like these dogs that
they're doing something. They're either holding some sort of a
a joint like object, or at the very least, they
have fire. They have fire in a way that seems
totally out of keeping with what dogs actually want and
do in reality. So a few examples. There is one
(02:13):
painting from the sixteen sixties by an artist named Wanda
Pereha that features a very cute dog laid out on
the ground with stubby little four legs tucked up under
his pawnchy chest, and there is a bouquet of white
flowers tossed to the ground in front of him, and
then between his jaws he is clutching a foot long
white cylinder that is on fire on the end opposite
(02:36):
of his mouth. And yes, it does look like some
kind of giant cigarette or something of that kind, but
it could also be maybe a candle. I don't know.
It's just a white thing that's on fire. Yeah, And
the dog has a very relaxed vibe doing this, and
it's just kind of a chalky, relaxed dog that doesn't
look like like I'm going to burn your city down
or anything like that. He's just hanging out. This is
(02:58):
a smooth chalk. All these that I'm mentioning are featured
in that that article by Ben Davis, by the way.
But so there's another painting from the sixteen eighties by
Claudio Coello, and it is a portrait of a certain
religious figure, but excluding the central figure for a second.
In the bottom left of the frame, there's a black
(03:18):
and white dog with a kind of skunk coloration pattern,
and he is biting what looks like a fence post
that's on fire, and you can see his little under
fangs in the lower canines holding fast to that burning steak. Yeah,
Now this one looks a little more fierce, a little
more mischievous even uh. There he's also next to a
spherical object. I forget what you call these um in
(03:41):
religious iconography of Catholicism, but it reminds me of a globe,
and so I get kind of this feeling of the
dog threatening to torch the earth. Well, and that also
seems to be a theme, because here's yet another one
that was in Davis's post. So this is by jose
guild Castro from eighteen seventeens, a later painting, but once
(04:01):
again there is a person at the center of this painting.
But in the lower right corner there is a bizarre scene.
There's this big old blue sphere like a big azure
beach ball, and then on top of the ball there
is a dog. Except this dog looks ferocious. He is
showing all his sharp little teeth and he's digging into
the ball with his claws, and once again he's holding
(04:24):
a burning stick in his mouth, except this time he's
holding the stick so that the business end, the end
that's on fire, is stabbing into the blue ball like
he's trying to burn a hole in it. So, so
what's up here well, Davis explains, actually, uh, this is
religious iconography. These are animals that mean something. Uh. So
(04:44):
I mentioned that in most of these artworks the central
subject is a person rather than a dog. And then
there's a dog with a with a burning stick or
a cigarette or whatever down in the corner. The person
in the middle of the painting is almost always one
of two people. It is either St. Jayne Santa Juana
of of Aza or her son St. Dominic Santo Domingo,
(05:07):
who was a very important figure in the history of
the Catholic Church lived from the twelfth to the thirteenth century,
and he was a Catholic priest who founded the Dominican
Order in twelve sixteen. Uh to read from davis quote,
thereby setting the world on fire metaphorically in terms of
spreading the faith. As a matter of fact, Dominican preachers
(05:29):
were sometimes called Dominique khans or the dogs of the
Lord Goodness. It's a very good medieval pun for you.
But so, according to legend, St. Dominic's mother St. Jane
was granted a premonition in the form of a vision
from God, and in her vision she saw that she
(05:49):
was pregnant, but with a dog, and the dog carried
a flaming tortun in its mouth, and then when she
in the vision gave birth to the dog, it was
run and around. It darted all over the place with
the torch and set fire to everything. And this was
interpreted to me and that her son would metaphorically set
the world on fire, meaning he would preach a message
(06:12):
that would reach the ends of the earth. And so
by establishing the Dominican Order, I think, you know, they
were largely well. They had a number of concerns, but
one of them was like preaching against heresies of the
Middle Ages. So if you're a heretic, you need to
watch out for the dog with the flaming brand because
it is coming to set the world on fire. Now,
I have to say, in some of these images I
(06:33):
totally get this vibe, you know, particularly that one that
where he's not he's not actually making contact with the
globe like object that he seems to be threatening to do.
So I can see it. This is a vision dog.
This is a dog that is bringing prophecy from divine realms.
But that first guy that that that that chunky one
we were talking about, I don't know he he doesn't
(06:54):
look like he's wandered out of any vision. He looks
like the painter had a much beloved dog his life
and decided, well, if I'm going to put in this
dog of prophecy, I'm gonna put my dog Schakers in there.
And uh, and that's who I want to paint. You know,
this is something I often wonder looking at old paintings
and sculptures of religious figures. So if there's a a
(07:15):
painting of of John the Baptist where he looks really hunky,
is it because this person, you know, the painter was
filled with religious fervor for this scene involving John the
Baptist and really wanted to depict that. Or is it
because he like had a friend or a model or
something that he really wanted to paint and he's like,
who can I I'll say, this guy is John the Baptist. Yeah. Yeah,
(07:38):
And ultimately I think in some cases that is the reality.
You have painters who want to paint, say the human
form and it are you know, obsessed with the with
anatomy and the and how to properly relate that in
the painting. But how are you going to do that
and get paid? You know, Uh, but well this could
be this could be the dog version, right. Yeah, so
this is like you're saying, this is his dog that
(08:00):
he loves, and he was just wants to paint the dog.
He's like, how can I? Oh, I know this is
the dog of the vision of St. Jayne. Yeah, and
he's looking right at you. It's a beautiful painting. It's
a very lifelike rendering of this dog. Yeah, Wanda Parade,
two thumbs up. I love your chalk. Now, all of
this talk of holy dogs and uh Catholic tradition, you
(08:20):
know this. This is all well and good, but uh,
one one question that that certainly arises is do we
find anything like this anywhere else in the world, Because
on one hand, like I said, this is not something
dogs do. This is not something around yeah, carry fire
around it. In fact, I was looking around to find
any account of this happening, certainly any like videos of like, oh,
(08:43):
here's our dog. He likes to carry a flaming brand
around the house, and I found virtually nothing. The closest
I came was a video that allegedly is of a
dog swooping in to grab a lit firework before it
can blast off. Yeah, exactly the same here I was.
I was thinking, is this a natural phenomenon or their
observed conditions where a dog will commonly pick up a
(09:04):
flaming stick? And I was looking all over the place
and found nothing really except I found a couple of
instances of people talking about dogs that had specifically been
trained to carry a flaming torch or something. But it
was just in the context of dogs being trained to
do all kinds of tricks like jump through a flaming
hoop or anything like that. So I think carrying a
flaming torch is something you could train a dog to do,
(09:27):
in the sense that you can train a dog to
do just about anything. So it would stand a reason
it would seem possible that maybe this is just a
one off, you know, it's certainly if we believe this, uh,
this story, that this is a dog of vision and prophecy,
you know, just sort of random dream imagery that comes together, uh,
you know, or some sort of a vision, some sort
of hallucination, whatever, the you know, the the real world
(09:50):
situation might be that maybe this is just something that
occurs once in human traditions and we're not likely to
expect to see it pop up anywhere else, and yet
I found one. I found another dog with a with
a flaming stick. Uh, And I'm not I'm still not
sure exactly what to make of it. How much of
it we can sort of chalk up to, uh, you know,
(10:12):
cultural convergent evolution or if if if Ultimately we can
get down to certain realities about dogs and humans, humanities,
relationship with the dog. Um. You know, I think maybe
it's a little bit of both of those, so you
might So you're wondering, where is this? Where do we
have to go to find this other dog with the
flaming brand? Well, we have to travel once more to
(10:34):
pre Columbian um Mesoamerica. We have to travel to the
Aztec world and also the Mayan world and look to
the fire carrying dog in these cultures as well. Okay,
I'm ready to go. All right, Well, let's start with
the Aztecs and I'll come back to some of the
Mayan examples, but uh, just to refresh the Aztec world.
(10:55):
This flourished in the central Mexico from around thirteen hundred
to fifteen twenty one. They rose out of obscurity among
various indigenous peoples of the region and became a dominant power. Now,
civilizations are of course a human affair, but of course
they always entail other species, including domesticated plants and animals.
(11:16):
So we've discussed the importance of maize to the Aztecs
as well as other crops, but they also had some
domesticated animals. The their domestic animals included turkeys, which I
believe we discussed Aztecs and their turkeys in the past.
Also bees. I think there are some cases for ducks
and geese and maybe quail, but I see that in
(11:38):
some sources. But on the other so, I'm I'm not
entirely certain that that is a definite or or maybe
even a universal reality of of of Aztecs. Maybe there
were certain regions where they may have had some domestic
ducks and geese, but for the most part, when you
talk about the domesticated animals of the Aztecs, you're talking
about the turkey, you're talking about bees, and you're talking
(12:00):
about the dog, the old reliable, the dogs always there. Yes, yeah,
and and and I really think it's important to keep
in mind through all this that I think that's that
seems to be a universal thing. I think that Ultimately,
the way that like medieval Europeans viewed the dog is
largely in keeping with the way Aztecs and minds viewed
(12:23):
the dog as well. They're gonna be some differences as
well discuss, but I think ultimately there's a lot about
the dog being man's best friend in all of this.
You know, the dog is the creature that sticks by you,
and and maybe ultimately like that is where we get
this idea of the dog carrying the flame, because who
else is going to carry the flame for humanity? Is
(12:43):
it going to be the cat? Now? So I was
reading about all of this in The Use and Significance
of Animals in Aztec Rituals by Maria Convalineri from twenty
from two thousand and nine, and she points out a
few important things here. First of all, she points out
that the Aztecs were really latively poor in domesticated animals
compared to various other cultures we might look to. Common
(13:05):
people would only eat meat on special occasions. They had
no draft animals. The turkey was ultimately their greatest domestic
meat source, and their eggs also provided protein. But they
also had dogs, and not merely one variety of dogs
or just dogs in the generic sense. They had several
varieties of dog, and one of these was apparently used
(13:27):
almost exclusively for food. And this was true of the
Mayans as well, as Alan Jay Christensen points out in
pople Vou, the Sacred Book of the Maya Volume one,
the Mayans also depended on the dog, the turkey, and
the honey bee. And these dogs were quote small, fat,
nearly hairless. Uh, and they didn't bark. But that but
(13:48):
here's the important thing to drive home is that they
weren't just it wasn't just a food species. They were
both food and pet. This was a creature that would
that was a companion that was a pet. But then
also under certain circumstances, again not every day, but but
but when necessary, it was also a food species. Now
(14:08):
some of the details of the Aztec dog, they were
apparently I'm reading three different rough varieties. There's the medium
sized furred dog. The it's quintly and this was also
a hunting dog. So that's an important thing to keep
in mind too, like the dog also has this purpose
and cultures around the world where it's helping us a
choir food. Then there is the medium sized hairless dog.
(14:32):
And this is the Showlitz quintly And this is um
this this would have been a dog that would have
been used as one of these these pets slash food dogs.
And then there's also a short legged, furred dog and
this is the cloud chee chee. And I'm reading that
this one might have also been a meat dog at
times as well. Now, according to UH Confelinary, it seems
(14:55):
that the hairless variety was primarily the food dog, at
least in some read but again only for special occasions. UH.
And there are Aztec depictions of their wrinkled hairless faces,
and these are worth looking up like it's it's undeniable,
Like this is not a um um, you know, a
loupine or type of a dog face. This is not
the face of a coyote. Coyotes were of course also
(15:18):
around in the wild. No, this is the face of
the domestic dog. And I do think we need to
be careful, of course, not to equate the consumption of
dog meat with cruelty to animals in this context, at
least no more than we might equate any traditional historic
meat consumption to cruelty, Because, as Confelinary stresses, these dogs
(15:38):
were also pets. Uh, certainly with the furred varieties, but
even the hairless ones, they would have been well treated,
and they fulfilled the role of both pet and food.
And there was a religious reason to treat dogs well,
be they you know, hunting dog or a dog that
would be used for for for food. At some point,
dogs were seen as psychopomps by the as text, which
(16:00):
is to say, it was the role of the dog
to shepherd the human soul across the ninefold stream to
reach the center of the underworld, the afterlife of Midland. Interesting. Yeah,
and in some accounts, you have to be very particular
about the color of the dog. I found this interesting. Uh.
The idea was that white dogs have just bathed, and
(16:23):
therefore they're not gonna enter the waters. They're not gonna
get you across the ninefold stream to the center of
the afterlife. Um. Black dogs, on the other hand, they
will cross, but they can only carry their own souls.
What you need is like a yellow dog. That's the
dog that's gonna get you across the ninefold stream. Uh,
that's gonna carry its own soul, but also yours. Interesting. Now,
(16:44):
Confolinari shares a great quote from twentieth century pre Columbian
art expert Elizabeth P. Benson on all of this, it
kind of sums up and extrapolates on why the dog.
Why is the dog the psychopomph? Benson wrote, dogs are
appropriate escorts for the dead. They walk with their noses
to the ground. They dig in the earth, barry bones
(17:06):
and hunt in burrows. They eat carrion and make themselves
smell of it. They have night vision. They howl at night.
They know what is there in the darkness relating to
the earth, the dead, things to sounds and smells that
are imperceptible to humans. Dogs have esoteric knowledge and special
connections with the underworld. Oh that's a wonderful observation about
(17:30):
the the inferred supernatural power of a dog, just because
of the different kind of sense realms a dog can
occupy that the dog detects something in the darkness before
you do. They hear it before you do. They might
be able to see or smell things that you can't see,
or smell, or certainly smell things you can't smell. So
you would you would agree with this as a dog owner?
(17:53):
Oh yeah, pretty much. Any dog owner, I think would
have the experience of the dog knows something around the
house is going on before you do. They know that
somebody is approaching the front door before you do, or
you take maybe you go out back in the darkness
and in the nighttime, and the dog knows something is
there that you don't detect in any way, and maybe
(18:14):
it's a possum on top of the offense or something. Um.
But but yeah, yeah, the the dog is aware of
things before you're aware of them, and sometimes things that
you never become aware of. Maybe it um it. It's
attention perks up and it barks at something in the
darkness that comes and goes and then it's gone and
you never see what it is. That could, given the
(18:34):
right mindset, leads someone to believe that the dog is
maybe interacting with spirits or interacting with with with something
beyond the human sense realm. Yeah, yeah, And of course
even if you're not going to the spiritual uh extreme
of that interpretation, undoubtedly the dog is a protector. The
dog is raising an alarm. Even if it can't bark,
(18:56):
it'll raise some sort of an alarm that's something is
perhaps there that shouldn't be Uh, it's gonna play a
role in protecting, uh, the domicile, perhaps also helping to
protect the crops to some degree. Yeah, so that's important
to keep in mind here as well. But there's another
thing mentioned in Benson's quote that is also interesting about
the association with with say death and carrion. I mean,
(19:21):
so as as beautiful and sweet and pure as as
dogs are, at least in my mind, they're also they're
interested in disgusting dead things that humans, that will make
the human senses revolt and that will make you want
to stay away. But the dog wants to approach. So
it makes sense. This is this is a world they
understand we may be repelled by. And therefore, who's going
(19:43):
to guide you through the realms of death? You're good,
old dog. Now. One of the issues here is that
the dog, if this dog is gonna guide you through
the afterlife, it also needs to cross over with you
as well. It needs to be buried with you. And
thus dogs were also used in ritual sacrifice by the Aztects.
(20:06):
But where does fire come into all this, you're probably wondering.
So far this dog has not been running around with fire. Well,
we're gonna We're gonna get to that here um those
certainly the idea of the dog guiding you through a
dark underworld like that that already leans itself to interpretations
of a dog carrying some sort of fire, a dog
lighting the way and being your guide through the darkness.
(20:28):
So the next fact worth mentioning in all this current
concerns the Aztec god Sholatl, described guy by confolin Ary
as skeletal, dog faced, or dog bodied. Now Sholatl is
the twin of quetzal Codal, also described as the god
of monsters and the patron deity of twins, both human
(20:50):
twins and also just sort of general twinning in nature
anytime something seems to have a dual existence or nature,
and the connection here does seem to be to the
domestic dog too. When we're talking about this this god
being dog faced or dog bodied, it's not the coyotes face.
It's you know, which was a wild scavenger, and it
is also sometimes associated with the god of the smoking
(21:12):
near uh ts Catl Polka. Depictions of Cholatto, including one
discovered during the construction of the Mexico City subway system,
includes details clearly associated with the hairless, wrinkle face domestic dog.
So to be clear, food pet dog reflected in the
divine image here, not a wild dog or even a
(21:34):
hunting dog. This is uh, this is the the hairless,
wrinkly dog that is the face or even the body
of the divine So you've got a picture here of this,
this carving of the dog face. Yeah, and it is
unmistakably doggy because you see the wrinkles in the skin,
and you see the kind of relatively stubby snout compared
to what you'd see with like a wool for a coyote. Yeah. Yeah,
(21:56):
absolutely so. So there doesn't seem to be any mystery
here concern earning this god's connection to the domestic dog.
So to the Aztecs, dogs were important. They were valued
for their companionship, their loyalty, their food value, their protective
nature to both the family and the crops. They were
important enough to be the likeness of a major deity,
a god of twins and monsters, but also a god
(22:19):
of lightning and fire. So this raises the question, right,
why is the dog also associated with fire and Aztec traditions. Well,
here we come at last yet to the idea of
the Aztec dog as firebringer. Herman Buyer explored this in
the Symbolic Meaning of the Dog in Ancient Mexico, published
in the in the American Anthropologists back in nineteen o eight.
(22:42):
Now referring back to the different dog varieties again, there's
that medium sized furred dog, or it's quintly, but it's
quintly also just means dog more generally. And then the
dog also played a role in the Aztec zodiac, so
the day of this dog it occurs at the end
and is therefore associated with the god mic lant Culti,
(23:05):
lord of the realm of the dead, who rules over
Micklin with his bride. And we see this in my
traditions as well, as Buyer points out where the symbol
for dog is mainly a thorax and a skeleton. A thorax, yeah,
thora like an insect thorax. Yeah, I was looking at
examples of it, and um, I don't know. The comparison
is maybe a little lost on me because I'm just
(23:27):
not used to looking at these characters. But I mean,
I take I take the researcher's word for it. I mean,
I guess mammals would have a thorax too, so it
would be like the dog's chest sort of now to
come back to Chilato here, uh Buyer writes that Cholato's
job is also to carry the sun through the underworld
and is associated with a particular constellation in the night
(23:48):
sky that was known as the fire Sticks. And so
the association here, Buyer writes is that the fire drill
method of fire production is linked to the dog into
this deity. The constellation here is possibly the Belt of
Orion Um. I've seen some some back and forth on that,
but I think the Belt of Orion is the popular
(24:10):
UH interpretation of discussions of this particular constellation, and he's
a sauce also associated with the Polades star cluster and
the fire drill method of fire production. This would be
a friction based method for forgetting a fire going right
for Yeah, it would involve a setup for rapidly rotating
(24:31):
one piece of wood on another to generate heat through
friction that would help spark some kindling. Yeah. We we
discussed this a bit in our fire Technology series of
invention episodes. This would have been a very early way
to produce fire. And you also see Prometheus type characters
and other religions and traditions that that are closely associated
(24:53):
with the fire drill. I've seen the Chinese version of
this as being referred to in translation as the fire driller.
So it makes sense that that the primordial connection with
fire production would be tied in with this technology. Now
there's also there also does seem to be a connection
as well between Scholatl and Venus appearing in the in
(25:15):
the night sky as a morning star. Again, we're getting
into this idea that that this deity and or the
dog carry the fire through the underworld, carry the sun
through the underworld. And so this gets into the idea
of like where does Venus go? Where does the sun
go when it is not in the sky? Well, it
is of course traveling beneath the earth, it is traveling
(25:38):
through the underworld. So um, in all of this, I
have to stress that I'm I'm not giving full justice
to the complexity and richness of Aztec astrology here. Whole
books have been written about Aztec astrology, uh and and it.
But it seems that that there are complex astrological associations
between dogs and death and fire, and that the has
(26:00):
worked in unison with less abstract aspects of the dog's
nature and role in society and it's just overall value
to humanity. Now in in my In traditions, as reflected
in the Mayan codices, the dog is also the firebringer.
I was reading about this in The Dragon and the Dog,
Two Symbols of Time in Non All Religion by Frank J. Newman.
(26:25):
Newman writes, quote, the dog is often depicted in the
Maya codices carrying a torch, perhaps a reference to the
Maya tradition that the dog brought fire to mankind, and
the head of a dog is sometimes part of the
compound glyph which represents the fire drill. Okay, so, if
I'm understanding everything I've been looking at here, it sounds
as if we have a few things going on sort
(26:47):
of feeding into each other. First of all, astrological associations
between dogs and fire. Uh. Secondly mythological connotations of the
dog or dog headed deities as firebringers. And then connections
some mythological and some astrological connecting dogs to the dead
and to the realm of the dead. And on top
of that, though, I think perhaps some manner of bleed
(27:08):
over between control of fire as a major factor in
human civilization and the importance of the domestic dog which
again in this context, would have served pretty much all
of the values placed on the domestic dog in the
modern context you know, companion, guardian, etcetera, with the added
context of being the their only domesticated mammalian protein source.
(27:30):
You know, again, they did not have the domesticated cow,
the domesticated pig, all of these these other creatures to
help provide the nutrition they needed. The dog was the
only domestic mammal that could fulfill that that need. I've
also read that at least in some Mesoamerican traditions and accounts,
the dog is credited with discovering corn, which would would
(27:52):
also be a huge achievement on par with fire in
some regards. Uh. So, so again we see these multiple
connections here that that's speak to the dog's role in civilization,
like the fact that humans have mastery over things that
enable them to to build civilizations and to keep going
year after year. Uh, and to pass on something to
(28:13):
to their children. Uh, it's the fire, it's the crops
that are key, but also the dog. Yeah, this is
a fascinating triangle that sort of says something about about
the human species. Of the triangle of humans, dogs and
fire and uh, and so I wanted to transition from
here to look at a little bit of the scientific
(28:35):
evidence and and current leading hypotheses about the history of
the relationship between humans and these two elements of nature
and of of technology, in fact of fire, end of
dogs UM. So one of the things I wanted to
start off with here is remembering an interesting fact from
some of our past episodes. We did a couple of
episodes about UM about the history of fire on planet Earth,
(28:59):
and and the observation is this Earth is sometimes thought
of as the water planet, which is a good descriptor
there's a lot of liquid water on our surface, but
I think it's also quite reasonable to think of Earth
as the fire planet. Earth is really the only place
in the Solar System that allows for fire, certainly in
significant amounts, because in order to burn fire needs heat,
(29:23):
fuel and oxygen. And there are plenty of places in
the Solar System where you can find lots of heat,
but fuel and free oxygen are much more scarce. The
Earth is absolutely packed with these two things. It is
packed with fuel in the form of concentrated carbon molecules
produced by the biosphere, and it is packed with free oxygen.
(29:44):
And the atmosphere, which is also produced by the biosphere.
So so the conditions giving rise to the potential for
free burning fires actually are very much a product of
Earth's biology, the presence of life on Earth. Beyond that,
another interesting thing that makes it Earth the fire planet
is that, like humans don't have to be there to
start fires, Earth's weather systems naturally provide the flint that
(30:07):
continually strikes natural fires in the form of lightning. So
Earth is a place where where fire is not only possible,
but fire occurs. Right now, to come back to what
we were talking about earlier, Yes, Earth has fire, Earth
has dogs, but you really don't see a lot of
crossover between the two. Um In addition to what I
mentioned earlier, I mean, the most I really came across
(30:29):
was the idea that, yes, dogs will warm themselves by fires,
be at a camp fire or even some other form
of fire. There are situations where dogs have been observed
to take advantage of that heat, but other than that
there they don't seem to really interact with fire much,
which makes sense most you know, most species, even those
that have a life cycle that depends on periodic burns.
(30:50):
It doesn't mean that their anatomy is has has evolved
to actually deal with the reality of fire. Right then. Now,
there are some examples we've discussed before on the show
of animals appearing to, at least according to some reports,
make direct use of fire. For example, the fire hawks
of of Australia, which have been alleged to uh say,
(31:12):
use burning sticks to start fires to drive out prey
animals that they can then swoop down an attack. Um
I could not find any evidence of any species of Canada,
or any carnivore mammal for that matter, doing anything like this,
So so this does not appear to be something that
happens at nature in nature, at least on a regular basis.
But this did get me thinking about the history of
(31:35):
human domestication of fire and of human domestication of dogs,
both of which are fascinating and contentious subjects deep in
our past. Um So a few facts. First of all,
while there's a lot we don't know about both of
these subjects, I do think it's very clear that our
human ancestors domesticated fire long before they domesticated dogs. So
(32:00):
for a few facts about the general timeline of fire
development among ancient humans and human ancestors. I was looking
at a paper published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal
Society b Biological Sciences from twenty sixteen by a professor
of archaeology at the University of Liverpool named John Gaulet,
and it's called the discovery of fire by humans a
(32:22):
long and convoluted process. So in summarizing the existing evidence,
Galllet writes that finding evidence of fire use by really
ancient humans and human ancestors is sometimes difficult, right because
fire is not like it's not like a stone artifact,
though it does leave physical traces that you can on cover.
And he writes that by about one point five million
(32:43):
years ago, there are a number of sites occupied by
our hominan ancestors that show signs of burned material consistent
with deliberate fire use. Now, one point five million years
ago is a long time ago, but but this far
back the evidence is somewhat inconsistent. And it's worth noting
that the presence of fire at a human or or
(33:04):
hominin camp site is not necessarily evidence of the ability
to strike fire from nothing, say, by using a fire
drill or flint and tinder box or anything like that.
Human humans and human ancestors probably captured and preserved fires
from nature long before we had reliable fire striking methods.
(33:25):
But Galllet writes that by the time of the Middle Pleistocene,
so that would be between about three quarters of a
million years ago and about a hundred and twenty five
thousand years ago. H quote recognizable hearths demonstrate a social
and economic focus on many sites, so the Middle Pleistocene
seems to be pretty widely accepted as a time by
(33:46):
which fire use became widespread and common among humans. Now.
As wonderful as dogs are, fire is probably more pivotal
to human history and evolution. It's it's necessary for the
development of almost all post Stone Age technology, So all
technologies based on metal involve the use of fire and
their creation. Basically, all technologies after the Neolithic period would
(34:10):
need fire in order to be made. That this reminds
me of the quote that outside of a dog, a
book is man's best friend, but inside of a dog
it's too dark to read. You need to fire. Yeah,
Mark's brother, so yeah, you need the fire. But even
past the role of fire in creating a lot of
later stages of human technology, it's even been hypothesized that
(34:32):
fire has played major roles in in changes to human biology,
and this is not something that's known for sure, but
there are a number of theories that involve the intersection
of fire and changes to humans are our ourselves our
own biology. So one major example is the cooking hypothesis,
which I think we've alluded to on the show before.
Maybe someday we should devote a full episode to that
(34:54):
talk about some of the evidence for and against. But
this is a hypothesis put forward by a British anth
apologist and primatologists named Richard Wrangham, which argues that there
is a link between the invention of cooking, which necessitates fire,
and the shape of modern human bodies guts and brains
and in rangum zone. Words from a paper dealing with
(35:17):
some of the more recent evidence foreign against this hypothesis quote.
The cooking hypothesis posits that control of fire leads to
such a large increase in energy acquisition and that means
through eating and reduces the physical challenges of eating food
so greatly that the evolution of an obligation to incorporate
(35:38):
cooked food into the diet should be recognizable by evidence
of novel digestive adaptations and increased energy use. Yeah, we
have to remember that with cooking, we're talking about to
a very large degree, the externalization of human digestion. Things
that previously, if we were going to digest it, it
was all going to have to happen inside of us.
(35:59):
Now we could, we could take steps towards the acquisition
of those nutrients, sometimes nutrients that would not be available
to us if we did not cook them. We're able
to do that outside the human body, right, I mean
as sort of central to what Rangum is saying here
is that subsisting entirely on a raw food diet versus
subsisting on a cooked food diet, that is such a
(36:20):
huge difference that you would expect basically different kinds of animals.
That is a gigantic adaptation that would change. It would
change the way your mouth needs to work. You would
need to devote way less energy to having a strong
jaw for chewing and crushing. It would change the way
your gut needs to work. And of course the body
could maybe spend that energy on other things. And like
(36:40):
I said, maybe we should come back and do a
whole episode on that someday, because yeah, I was looking
at some of the arguments foreign against this, and it
seems like an interesting debate. But so not to say
that the cooking hypothesis is necessarily correct, But I do
think it's inarguable that fire is a major part of
the development of all human and culture and shapes our
(37:01):
lives tremendously. So some use of fire by human ancestors
probably goes back more than a million years. Uh, the
use of fire was common among human ancestors at least
a few hundred thousand years ago by most estimates. The
domestication of dogs seems to be roughly in order of
magnitude more recent. So if common use of fire goes
(37:24):
back at least a few hundred thousand years, domestication of
dogs seems to go back in the past few tens
of thousands of years than now. On the scientific evidence
for the history of the domestication of dogs. There's also
a lot of disagreement here. But there was one recent
(37:45):
development I've actually been wanting to talk about on the
show for a bit, and this gives us a good
chance to do it today. So there was a paper
that was published just earlier this year by Angela our
period all published in p N a se called dog
domestication and the dual dispersal of people and dogs into
the Americas. And this was a paper that was trying
(38:07):
to settle some some ongoing debates and outstanding questions about
the history of dog domestication and how that relates to
the history of human migration over the continents. And so
this study tried to use DNA evidence from both dogs
and humans to try to trace the history of the
relationship between the two and uh according to the authors here,
(38:30):
their findings suggests quote that dogs were domesticated in Siberia
by about twenty three thousand years ago, possibly while both
people and wolves were isolated during the harsh climate of
the last Glacial Maximum. Dogs then accompanied the first people
into the Americas and traveled with them as humans rapidly
(38:51):
dispersed into the continent beginning about fifteen thousand years ago.
So I was reading a really good write up of
this new paper by David Grimm in Science that fills
in some more context on this and give some texture
to it. So um, according to the model put forward
by the study, Grim rights that the people who domesticated
dogs probably lived in the area of northeastern Siberia, during
(39:15):
the later part of the last glacial period the Last
Ice Age, and these would have been human hunter is
using stone tipped weapons who probably subsisted on megafauna like
bison and wooly mammoths, and the wolf like ancestors of
modern dogs may have actually been helping these humans in
their hunting. And then from here from this ancestral population
(39:38):
in northeastern Siberia, the descendants of these proto dogs went
both east and west with their human companions, so east
into the Americas and then west into Eurasia. So the
team behind the study, they relied on physical evidence in
the form of mitochondrial DNA from a human and dog remains.
(39:59):
Mitochondrial DNA is more readily preserved over time and say
fossil remains and animal remains than DNA from the nucleus
of cells, and they concluded that all lineages of dogs
that accompanied the first human settlers into North America shared
a common ancestor that was indicated by a genetic marker
called A to B, and the researchers believe these dogs
(40:23):
to have descended from this common ancestor population that were
these domesticated or semi domesticated dogs born in the company
of humans in North Siberia about twenty three thousand years ago.
Now imagining the sort of setting of this ancestral population
of of wolves turning into dogs and the humans that
(40:43):
we're creating them. Uh, the setting here is is something
like twenty three to thirty one thousand years ago in
this area of northeastern Siberia that Grim Rights was apparently
relatively temperate compared to the areas all around it, and
it was that way for thousands of years. So you
have to imagine a place that during a an ice
(41:05):
age is surrounded on the east and the west by
regions that are probably too cold and barren to sustain
the lifestyle of of these human hunter gatherers, and so
basically they would have been isolated in these hunting grounds
in northeastern Siberia that it was kind of an oasis
in which they could live. And there were also populations
of wolves occupying this relative oasis in in the last
(41:28):
glacial period along with these human hunters. Now we'll come
back to that oasis concept in a minute, but first
I wanted to mention that we're not sure how exactly
the domestication of dogs happened. You know, you want to
be careful not to put too much confidence in people
trying to tell a plausible story that could explain things,
because we don't know for sure. But there's a common
(41:50):
hypothesis on the domestication process leading from the wolf to
the domestic dog that seems pretty plausible, and it goes
like this. So you have humans who are hunting and
gathering food and maybe making these large mega fauna kills.
You know, they're killing a wooly mammoth or a bison
or something and roasting meat over the fire at campsites,
(42:11):
and wild wolves are obviously drawn to the smell of
the food that humans have harvested. And then from here
it's possible that a selection process kicks in and it
would go something like this. Wolves that are too skittish
around humans, they just don't you know, they keep their distance.
You know, they don't want anything to do with humans.
Humans are too scary, uh, they stay back. Obviously, any
(42:33):
wolves that were too aggressive or violent about approaching humans
would react with with violence, and probably those wolves would
be killed. But wolves that happen to have behavioral predispositions
causing them to approach humans but not approach aggressively would
probably get to share in some of the scraps at
the human campsite. They would somehow get by their proximity
(42:56):
to human encampments, get to maybe I don't know, gavenge
the remains or maybe non the bones that the humans
tossed away, or maybe even humans would deliberately share with them,
you know, who knows. And sort of imagine how that
there could be a crossover between the two, like from
toleration to perhaps active feeding over time. You know, it
(43:17):
is conclar that these dogs are not a threat, and hey,
maybe they're actually amusing. Maybe they're interesting to look at, uh,
and and everything can build up from there. Sure, and
so again, if this hypothesis is in any way correct,
these brave but docile scavengers, the dogs, the wolves who
would approach but wouldn't be aggressive, they would benefit from
(43:37):
the extra food rewards they would get from proximity to
these human campsites, and from that extra food they would
have a survival advantage, and over generations there would be
these populations of wolf like creatures or proto dogs, these
canids who would essentially have bred themselves to become friendly
companions to humans. At some point, the human would probably
(44:00):
have found out that these proto dogs were useful for
hunting and maybe even for friendship and so forth. So again, uh,
you know, we don't know that this is how it happened,
but this is a commonly entertained, plausible history of what
could have happened here. And it's interesting that if there's
anything to this hypothesis, the process that led to the
(44:22):
creation of dogs was in part their ancestors willingness to
walk towards the fire. Yeah. Yeah, the dog that tolerates
the heat, the light, the dog that that steps into
the glow of the fire. Yeah. That article by David
Graham and Science actually quotes one of the collaborators on
the study, and archaeologist named David Meltzer, who I believe
(44:44):
is on on faculty at Southern Methodist University. Uh And
and his quote is great. He says, these people were
probably sleeping on the ground in furs, roasting fresh kills
on the fire. If you're a hungry carnivore and you
smell a mammoth barbecue, you're going to check it out.
And so yeah, I like the idea that, you know,
maybe in the same way that cooking changed humans, something
(45:06):
cooking could have possibly played a role in the attraction
of these wolf like ancestors of modern dogs. Yeah, and
I find it interesting to think about this and then
think about, you know, the end result with with mine
and Aztec situation civilization. To imagine these Eurasian people's moving
(45:26):
across the world, uh over into North America and then
downward towards mes of American South America, and what did
they bring with them? You know, obviously they brought their
cultures and their traditions and their knowledge, but they but
they brought with them the fire, and they brought with
them the dog. You know, a lot of the other
things they may have brought with them in the short
term would have given way to new crops that the
(45:50):
new plants they might discover, new animals they might discover.
But the fire and the dog were certainly constants. Now,
one last thing I wanted to come back to with
this study from earlier this year. There's one possible catch
in this, this hypothetical process by which the earliest ancestors
of dogs were created. It might be kind of problematic
(46:10):
to imagine that nomadic humans who are moving all over
the place to to follow, say their prey animals, you know,
they're the nomadic human hunters could have created these dogs
because they would be moving and so encountering probably new
population of wolves wherever they went, so that there might
not be enough repeated exposure to the same populations of
(46:32):
wolves to create the dogs. But one of the things
put forward in this study is that it would have
had this sort of oasis place in in northeastern Siberia
that was surrounded on all sides by more harsh environments.
So you would have the humans staying in a relatively
stable location and wolf populations staying in the same uh
place with them, So you'd have them just interacting in
(46:55):
close quarters for thousands of years at a time, and
this could have given the opportunity to actually kick off
and sustain this breeding process turning wolves into dogs. Huh. Interesting.
You know, all of this reminds me of of another
little piece that came up because in a weird way,
it has a little bit of the of the Catholic traditions,
(47:15):
certainly has some of the Mayan traditions, but also some
of these ideas we've been discussing dealing with the hypothesis
of of of dog domestication I was reading in E. J.
Silawowski's The Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception, Volume
six and M and I just want to read this
little quote from it. Here. Morris Siegel, to demonstrate the
(47:37):
fusion of Spanish, Catholic, and Mayan Indian traits in the
religions of Indians and modern Western Guatemala, recounts a cultured
creation story he recorded there in nineteen forty one in
which the child God, which the author says equals Jesus
in this scenario, son of our virgin mother, gathered together
(47:58):
the meat bones from his uncle's feast, planted them, and
built a corral around the place. In three days, all
the animals in the world had grown from the buried bones,
and the uncle's jealous opened the corral and released the animals.
Yet the dog was one of the few that remained,
whether willingly or simply out of a failure to escape
(48:21):
to live with human beings. WHOA I like that because
it again it kind of gets into an idea about
the dog, like the does the dog stick with us
because it is clever or because it is dumb? Because
the dog is and I think it's ultimately neither of those.
But you know that the idea that, like, why is
the dog the animal that seems closest to us, that is,
(48:43):
that is man's best friend. But then also this account
involves slaughter at a campsite, you know, it involves the
bones of the dead, So we get that connection to
this idea of the dog as the as having an
innate connection to the realms beyond death, but also this
connection to human cooking. Yeah, totally. I also like the
(49:04):
way that this I don't know this, something about this
vision of the dog makes it both the most and
least mysterious of creatures. You know, It's like the most
familiar but also has one of the most intriguing histories
that we you know, is somewhat obscure to us. Yeah. Yeah,
the idea that like the dog has just the dog
is there. The dog has remained there. Uh, even if
(49:25):
you don't want the dog anymore, the dog will will stay,
which is kind of reflected in this story. To the
jealous uncles are like, get these animals, Get these animals
out of here hanging out around our bones. The dog
doesn't go. The dog is here to stay. But I
have to say, I do really like this idea of
the dog is the firebringer and the dog and dog
is the dog carrying the fire for humanity, lighting the
(49:47):
way for us into the dark. Because this does seem
to just it, it's kind of lines up with a
lot of the the attributes that we we recognize in
our relationships with our pets. Know, I mean, particularly with
the dog. You know this, this is our buddy, This
is he's a guide, He's a guardian and and perhaps
has esoteric knowledge of the great beyond. All dogs are wizards. Yeah, yeah,
(50:13):
And so the next time you're you're making eye contact
with your dog, just remember this animal knows the way
to Micklin. Now, obviously we'd love to hear from everyone
out there, especially dog owners. I'm sure you have some
thoughts on all of this. I do want to drive
home the Please do not try and give your dog
anything on fire because of anything you heard in this episode.
(50:33):
We're certain your dog doesn't want any part of the fire,
and only disaster can occur if you try to recreate
these artistic and mythic images um using an actual canine. Yes, children,
do not try to recreate an active dog py romancy
you heard about on this podcast. However, I will just
(50:55):
throw this out there. If you want to get a
dog toy that looks like a torch or a flame brand,
they do exist, you can, but you can find them.
I'm looking at a couple of varieties of these right now.
So if you are inspired by this podcast and you
want pictures of your dog holding a flaming brand, uh,
you know, bringing some sort of vision to humanity. Uh yeah,
just go spend nine to seventeen dollars and get yourself
(51:18):
a chew toy torch. Are these are these two toys
merch created by the Dominicans. Um, I know van gift shop.
Let's see. I see one that is labeled as Frisco
Mythical Mates of Viking torch plus Squeaking dog toy. It
sounds lovely and it's available for like Okay, I don't
(51:39):
know why it's a Viking thing. Like the Vikings didn't
come up in this podcast at all. It needs to
be connected to the Mayans or to uh to to Catholics.
Needs to be a Frisco Mythical Mates Catholic torch plus
squeaking dog toy or something. All right, we're gonna go
and close this one. Out, but yeah, certainly right in
let us know. Tell us about your dog and if
(52:02):
you have a dog that has one of these, uh,
these two toys, yes, I would like to see a
picture of the two together. In the meantime, if you
want to listen to other episodes of Stuff to Blow
Your Mind, just check out the Stuff to Blow Your
Mind podcast feed. You can find that wherever you get
your podcasts. We have core episodes publishing Tuesdays and Thursdays.
We have a listener mail on Monday, we have an
artifact on Wednesday, and we have a Weird House CINAM
(52:24):
on Friday. That's our time to just talk about a
weird movie and set the science mostly aside for the
time being now and then we have a rerun on
the weekends. Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio
producers Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get
in touch with us with feedback on this episode or
any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or
just to say hello, you can email us at contact
that Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcam. Stuff to Blow
(52:54):
Your Mind is production of I Heart Radio. For more
podcasts for my Heart Radio, this is the i Heart
Radio app Apple pod tests, or wherever you're listening to
your favorite shows. F
My welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, the production
of My Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick,
and today we got an art question to start off with. Uh,
(00:21):
have you out there? Have you ever been wandering through
a museum and looking at old paintings, especially maybe paintings
from the medieval Europe or from the Renaissance period, and
you happen to come across a dog holding in its
mouth maybe what looks like a big, old rolled up
newspaper that's on fire, or as as many people on
(00:42):
the Internet have characterized it, smoking a joint or smoking
a hand rolled cigarette. You know, I have to admit
that I had I had never noticed this before, and
I'm I'm not an our expert by any stretch of
the imagination, but I feel like I've I've walked through
a number of really good art museums. I I've enjoyed
in the past diving into sort of detail oriented topics
(01:07):
that involve paintings, and yet I have never witnessed the
joint smoking dog or the firebrand bearing dog before until
it was brought to my attention by an an art
net dot com blog post or article that we were
talking about, right, So, I don't know how you came
(01:27):
across this, but you were the one who sent it
to me. And this was a blog post by an
American art critic named Ben Davis. Uh. That's very funny,
and it is addressing the question of why are there
so many medieval and Renaissance paintings that depict what looks
like a dog smoking a joint. That is the way
the author phrases it, and it's it's quite amusing because
(01:49):
it includes images examples of this and when you start
looking at them, yeah, it looks like these dogs that
they're doing something. They're either holding some sort of a
a joint like object, or at the very least, they
have fire. They have fire in a way that seems
totally out of keeping with what dogs actually want and
do in reality. So a few examples. There is one
(02:13):
painting from the sixteen sixties by an artist named Wanda
Pereha that features a very cute dog laid out on
the ground with stubby little four legs tucked up under
his pawnchy chest, and there is a bouquet of white
flowers tossed to the ground in front of him, and
then between his jaws he is clutching a foot long
white cylinder that is on fire on the end opposite
(02:36):
of his mouth. And yes, it does look like some
kind of giant cigarette or something of that kind, but
it could also be maybe a candle. I don't know.
It's just a white thing that's on fire. Yeah, And
the dog has a very relaxed vibe doing this, and
it's just kind of a chalky, relaxed dog that doesn't
look like like I'm going to burn your city down
or anything like that. He's just hanging out. This is
(02:58):
a smooth chalk. All these that I'm mentioning are featured
in that that article by Ben Davis, by the way.
But so there's another painting from the sixteen eighties by
Claudio Coello, and it is a portrait of a certain
religious figure, but excluding the central figure for a second.
In the bottom left of the frame, there's a black
(03:18):
and white dog with a kind of skunk coloration pattern,
and he is biting what looks like a fence post
that's on fire, and you can see his little under
fangs in the lower canines holding fast to that burning steak. Yeah,
Now this one looks a little more fierce, a little
more mischievous even uh. There he's also next to a
spherical object. I forget what you call these um in
(03:41):
religious iconography of Catholicism, but it reminds me of a globe,
and so I get kind of this feeling of the
dog threatening to torch the earth. Well, and that also
seems to be a theme, because here's yet another one
that was in Davis's post. So this is by jose
guild Castro from eighteen seventeens, a later painting, but once
(04:01):
again there is a person at the center of this painting.
But in the lower right corner there is a bizarre scene.
There's this big old blue sphere like a big azure
beach ball, and then on top of the ball there
is a dog. Except this dog looks ferocious. He is
showing all his sharp little teeth and he's digging into
the ball with his claws, and once again he's holding
(04:24):
a burning stick in his mouth, except this time he's
holding the stick so that the business end, the end
that's on fire, is stabbing into the blue ball like
he's trying to burn a hole in it. So, so
what's up here well, Davis explains, actually, uh, this is
religious iconography. These are animals that mean something. Uh. So
(04:44):
I mentioned that in most of these artworks the central
subject is a person rather than a dog. And then
there's a dog with a with a burning stick or
a cigarette or whatever down in the corner. The person
in the middle of the painting is almost always one
of two people. It is either St. Jayne Santa Juana
of of Aza or her son St. Dominic Santo Domingo,
(05:07):
who was a very important figure in the history of
the Catholic Church lived from the twelfth to the thirteenth century,
and he was a Catholic priest who founded the Dominican
Order in twelve sixteen. Uh to read from davis quote,
thereby setting the world on fire metaphorically in terms of
spreading the faith. As a matter of fact, Dominican preachers
(05:29):
were sometimes called Dominique khans or the dogs of the
Lord Goodness. It's a very good medieval pun for you.
But so, according to legend, St. Dominic's mother St. Jane
was granted a premonition in the form of a vision
from God, and in her vision she saw that she
(05:49):
was pregnant, but with a dog, and the dog carried
a flaming tortun in its mouth, and then when she
in the vision gave birth to the dog, it was
run and around. It darted all over the place with
the torch and set fire to everything. And this was
interpreted to me and that her son would metaphorically set
the world on fire, meaning he would preach a message
(06:12):
that would reach the ends of the earth. And so
by establishing the Dominican Order, I think, you know, they
were largely well. They had a number of concerns, but
one of them was like preaching against heresies of the
Middle Ages. So if you're a heretic, you need to
watch out for the dog with the flaming brand because
it is coming to set the world on fire. Now,
I have to say, in some of these images I
(06:33):
totally get this vibe, you know, particularly that one that
where he's not he's not actually making contact with the
globe like object that he seems to be threatening to do.
So I can see it. This is a vision dog.
This is a dog that is bringing prophecy from divine realms.
But that first guy that that that that chunky one
we were talking about, I don't know he he doesn't
(06:54):
look like he's wandered out of any vision. He looks
like the painter had a much beloved dog his life
and decided, well, if I'm going to put in this
dog of prophecy, I'm gonna put my dog Schakers in there.
And uh, and that's who I want to paint. You know,
this is something I often wonder looking at old paintings
and sculptures of religious figures. So if there's a a
(07:15):
painting of of John the Baptist where he looks really hunky,
is it because this person, you know, the painter was
filled with religious fervor for this scene involving John the
Baptist and really wanted to depict that. Or is it
because he like had a friend or a model or
something that he really wanted to paint and he's like,
who can I I'll say, this guy is John the Baptist. Yeah. Yeah,
(07:38):
And ultimately I think in some cases that is the reality.
You have painters who want to paint, say the human
form and it are you know, obsessed with the with
anatomy and the and how to properly relate that in
the painting. But how are you going to do that
and get paid? You know, Uh, but well this could
be this could be the dog version, right. Yeah, so
this is like you're saying, this is his dog that
(08:00):
he loves, and he was just wants to paint the dog.
He's like, how can I? Oh, I know this is
the dog of the vision of St. Jayne. Yeah, and
he's looking right at you. It's a beautiful painting. It's
a very lifelike rendering of this dog. Yeah, Wanda Parade,
two thumbs up. I love your chalk. Now, all of
this talk of holy dogs and uh Catholic tradition, you
(08:20):
know this. This is all well and good, but uh,
one one question that that certainly arises is do we
find anything like this anywhere else in the world, Because
on one hand, like I said, this is not something
dogs do. This is not something around yeah, carry fire
around it. In fact, I was looking around to find
any account of this happening, certainly any like videos of like, oh,
(08:43):
here's our dog. He likes to carry a flaming brand
around the house, and I found virtually nothing. The closest
I came was a video that allegedly is of a
dog swooping in to grab a lit firework before it
can blast off. Yeah, exactly the same here I was.
I was thinking, is this a natural phenomenon or their
observed conditions where a dog will commonly pick up a
(09:04):
flaming stick? And I was looking all over the place
and found nothing really except I found a couple of
instances of people talking about dogs that had specifically been
trained to carry a flaming torch or something. But it
was just in the context of dogs being trained to
do all kinds of tricks like jump through a flaming
hoop or anything like that. So I think carrying a
flaming torch is something you could train a dog to do,
(09:27):
in the sense that you can train a dog to
do just about anything. So it would stand a reason
it would seem possible that maybe this is just a
one off, you know, it's certainly if we believe this, uh,
this story, that this is a dog of vision and prophecy,
you know, just sort of random dream imagery that comes together, uh,
you know, or some sort of a vision, some sort
of hallucination, whatever, the you know, the the real world
(09:50):
situation might be that maybe this is just something that
occurs once in human traditions and we're not likely to
expect to see it pop up anywhere else, and yet
I found one. I found another dog with a with
a flaming stick. Uh, And I'm not I'm still not
sure exactly what to make of it. How much of
it we can sort of chalk up to, uh, you know,
(10:12):
cultural convergent evolution or if if if Ultimately we can
get down to certain realities about dogs and humans, humanities,
relationship with the dog. Um. You know, I think maybe
it's a little bit of both of those, so you
might So you're wondering, where is this? Where do we
have to go to find this other dog with the
flaming brand? Well, we have to travel once more to
(10:34):
pre Columbian um Mesoamerica. We have to travel to the
Aztec world and also the Mayan world and look to
the fire carrying dog in these cultures as well. Okay,
I'm ready to go. All right, Well, let's start with
the Aztecs and I'll come back to some of the
Mayan examples, but uh, just to refresh the Aztec world.
(10:55):
This flourished in the central Mexico from around thirteen hundred
to fifteen twenty one. They rose out of obscurity among
various indigenous peoples of the region and became a dominant power. Now,
civilizations are of course a human affair, but of course
they always entail other species, including domesticated plants and animals.
(11:16):
So we've discussed the importance of maize to the Aztecs
as well as other crops, but they also had some
domesticated animals. The their domestic animals included turkeys, which I
believe we discussed Aztecs and their turkeys in the past.
Also bees. I think there are some cases for ducks
and geese and maybe quail, but I see that in
(11:38):
some sources. But on the other so, I'm I'm not
entirely certain that that is a definite or or maybe
even a universal reality of of of Aztecs. Maybe there
were certain regions where they may have had some domestic
ducks and geese, but for the most part, when you
talk about the domesticated animals of the Aztecs, you're talking
about the turkey, you're talking about bees, and you're talking
(12:00):
about the dog, the old reliable, the dogs always there. Yes, yeah,
and and and I really think it's important to keep
in mind through all this that I think that's that
seems to be a universal thing. I think that Ultimately,
the way that like medieval Europeans viewed the dog is
largely in keeping with the way Aztecs and minds viewed
(12:23):
the dog as well. They're gonna be some differences as
well discuss, but I think ultimately there's a lot about
the dog being man's best friend in all of this.
You know, the dog is the creature that sticks by you,
and and maybe ultimately like that is where we get
this idea of the dog carrying the flame, because who
else is going to carry the flame for humanity? Is
(12:43):
it going to be the cat? Now? So I was
reading about all of this in The Use and Significance
of Animals in Aztec Rituals by Maria Convalineri from twenty
from two thousand and nine, and she points out a
few important things here. First of all, she points out
that the Aztecs were really latively poor in domesticated animals
compared to various other cultures we might look to. Common
(13:05):
people would only eat meat on special occasions. They had
no draft animals. The turkey was ultimately their greatest domestic
meat source, and their eggs also provided protein. But they
also had dogs, and not merely one variety of dogs
or just dogs in the generic sense. They had several
varieties of dog, and one of these was apparently used
(13:27):
almost exclusively for food. And this was true of the
Mayans as well, as Alan Jay Christensen points out in
pople Vou, the Sacred Book of the Maya Volume one,
the Mayans also depended on the dog, the turkey, and
the honey bee. And these dogs were quote small, fat,
nearly hairless. Uh, and they didn't bark. But that but
(13:48):
here's the important thing to drive home is that they
weren't just it wasn't just a food species. They were
both food and pet. This was a creature that would
that was a companion that was a pet. But then
also under certain circumstances, again not every day, but but
but when necessary, it was also a food species. Now
(14:08):
some of the details of the Aztec dog, they were
apparently I'm reading three different rough varieties. There's the medium
sized furred dog. The it's quintly and this was also
a hunting dog. So that's an important thing to keep
in mind too, like the dog also has this purpose
and cultures around the world where it's helping us a
choir food. Then there is the medium sized hairless dog.
(14:32):
And this is the Showlitz quintly And this is um
this this would have been a dog that would have
been used as one of these these pets slash food dogs.
And then there's also a short legged, furred dog and
this is the cloud chee chee. And I'm reading that
this one might have also been a meat dog at
times as well. Now, according to UH Confelinary, it seems
(14:55):
that the hairless variety was primarily the food dog, at
least in some read but again only for special occasions. UH.
And there are Aztec depictions of their wrinkled hairless faces,
and these are worth looking up like it's it's undeniable,
Like this is not a um um, you know, a
loupine or type of a dog face. This is not
the face of a coyote. Coyotes were of course also
(15:18):
around in the wild. No, this is the face of
the domestic dog. And I do think we need to
be careful, of course, not to equate the consumption of
dog meat with cruelty to animals in this context, at
least no more than we might equate any traditional historic
meat consumption to cruelty, Because, as Confelinary stresses, these dogs
(15:38):
were also pets. Uh, certainly with the furred varieties, but
even the hairless ones, they would have been well treated,
and they fulfilled the role of both pet and food.
And there was a religious reason to treat dogs well,
be they you know, hunting dog or a dog that
would be used for for for food. At some point,
dogs were seen as psychopomps by the as text, which
(16:00):
is to say, it was the role of the dog
to shepherd the human soul across the ninefold stream to
reach the center of the underworld, the afterlife of Midland. Interesting. Yeah,
and in some accounts, you have to be very particular
about the color of the dog. I found this interesting. Uh.
The idea was that white dogs have just bathed, and
(16:23):
therefore they're not gonna enter the waters. They're not gonna
get you across the ninefold stream to the center of
the afterlife. Um. Black dogs, on the other hand, they
will cross, but they can only carry their own souls.
What you need is like a yellow dog. That's the
dog that's gonna get you across the ninefold stream. Uh,
that's gonna carry its own soul, but also yours. Interesting. Now,
(16:44):
Confolinari shares a great quote from twentieth century pre Columbian
art expert Elizabeth P. Benson on all of this, it
kind of sums up and extrapolates on why the dog.
Why is the dog the psychopomph? Benson wrote, dogs are
appropriate escorts for the dead. They walk with their noses
to the ground. They dig in the earth, barry bones
(17:06):
and hunt in burrows. They eat carrion and make themselves
smell of it. They have night vision. They howl at night.
They know what is there in the darkness relating to
the earth, the dead, things to sounds and smells that
are imperceptible to humans. Dogs have esoteric knowledge and special
connections with the underworld. Oh that's a wonderful observation about
(17:30):
the the inferred supernatural power of a dog, just because
of the different kind of sense realms a dog can
occupy that the dog detects something in the darkness before
you do. They hear it before you do. They might
be able to see or smell things that you can't see,
or smell, or certainly smell things you can't smell. So
you would you would agree with this as a dog owner?
(17:53):
Oh yeah, pretty much. Any dog owner, I think would
have the experience of the dog knows something around the
house is going on before you do. They know that
somebody is approaching the front door before you do, or
you take maybe you go out back in the darkness
and in the nighttime, and the dog knows something is
there that you don't detect in any way, and maybe
(18:14):
it's a possum on top of the offense or something. Um.
But but yeah, yeah, the the dog is aware of
things before you're aware of them, and sometimes things that
you never become aware of. Maybe it um it. It's
attention perks up and it barks at something in the
darkness that comes and goes and then it's gone and
you never see what it is. That could, given the
(18:34):
right mindset, leads someone to believe that the dog is
maybe interacting with spirits or interacting with with with something
beyond the human sense realm. Yeah, yeah, And of course
even if you're not going to the spiritual uh extreme
of that interpretation, undoubtedly the dog is a protector. The
dog is raising an alarm. Even if it can't bark,
(18:56):
it'll raise some sort of an alarm that's something is
perhaps there that shouldn't be Uh, it's gonna play a
role in protecting, uh, the domicile, perhaps also helping to
protect the crops to some degree. Yeah, so that's important
to keep in mind here as well. But there's another
thing mentioned in Benson's quote that is also interesting about
the association with with say death and carrion. I mean,
(19:21):
so as as beautiful and sweet and pure as as
dogs are, at least in my mind, they're also they're
interested in disgusting dead things that humans, that will make
the human senses revolt and that will make you want
to stay away. But the dog wants to approach. So
it makes sense. This is this is a world they
understand we may be repelled by. And therefore, who's going
(19:43):
to guide you through the realms of death? You're good,
old dog. Now. One of the issues here is that
the dog, if this dog is gonna guide you through
the afterlife, it also needs to cross over with you
as well. It needs to be buried with you. And
thus dogs were also used in ritual sacrifice by the Aztects.
(20:06):
But where does fire come into all this, you're probably wondering.
So far this dog has not been running around with fire. Well,
we're gonna We're gonna get to that here um those
certainly the idea of the dog guiding you through a
dark underworld like that that already leans itself to interpretations
of a dog carrying some sort of fire, a dog
lighting the way and being your guide through the darkness.
(20:28):
So the next fact worth mentioning in all this current
concerns the Aztec god Sholatl, described guy by confolin Ary
as skeletal, dog faced, or dog bodied. Now Sholatl is
the twin of quetzal Codal, also described as the god
of monsters and the patron deity of twins, both human
(20:50):
twins and also just sort of general twinning in nature
anytime something seems to have a dual existence or nature,
and the connection here does seem to be to the
domestic dog too. When we're talking about this this god
being dog faced or dog bodied, it's not the coyotes face.
It's you know, which was a wild scavenger, and it
is also sometimes associated with the god of the smoking
(21:12):
near uh ts Catl Polka. Depictions of Cholatto, including one
discovered during the construction of the Mexico City subway system,
includes details clearly associated with the hairless, wrinkle face domestic dog.
So to be clear, food pet dog reflected in the
divine image here, not a wild dog or even a
(21:34):
hunting dog. This is uh, this is the the hairless,
wrinkly dog that is the face or even the body
of the divine So you've got a picture here of this,
this carving of the dog face. Yeah, and it is
unmistakably doggy because you see the wrinkles in the skin,
and you see the kind of relatively stubby snout compared
to what you'd see with like a wool for a coyote. Yeah. Yeah,
(21:56):
absolutely so. So there doesn't seem to be any mystery
here concern earning this god's connection to the domestic dog.
So to the Aztecs, dogs were important. They were valued
for their companionship, their loyalty, their food value, their protective
nature to both the family and the crops. They were
important enough to be the likeness of a major deity,
a god of twins and monsters, but also a god
(22:19):
of lightning and fire. So this raises the question, right,
why is the dog also associated with fire and Aztec traditions. Well,
here we come at last yet to the idea of
the Aztec dog as firebringer. Herman Buyer explored this in
the Symbolic Meaning of the Dog in Ancient Mexico, published
in the in the American Anthropologists back in nineteen o eight.
(22:42):
Now referring back to the different dog varieties again, there's
that medium sized furred dog, or it's quintly, but it's
quintly also just means dog more generally. And then the
dog also played a role in the Aztec zodiac, so
the day of this dog it occurs at the end
and is therefore associated with the god mic lant Culti,
(23:05):
lord of the realm of the dead, who rules over
Micklin with his bride. And we see this in my
traditions as well, as Buyer points out where the symbol
for dog is mainly a thorax and a skeleton. A thorax, yeah,
thora like an insect thorax. Yeah, I was looking at
examples of it, and um, I don't know. The comparison
is maybe a little lost on me because I'm just
(23:27):
not used to looking at these characters. But I mean,
I take I take the researcher's word for it. I mean,
I guess mammals would have a thorax too, so it
would be like the dog's chest sort of now to
come back to Chilato here, uh Buyer writes that Cholato's
job is also to carry the sun through the underworld
and is associated with a particular constellation in the night
(23:48):
sky that was known as the fire Sticks. And so
the association here, Buyer writes is that the fire drill
method of fire production is linked to the dog into
this deity. The constellation here is possibly the Belt of
Orion Um. I've seen some some back and forth on that,
but I think the Belt of Orion is the popular
(24:10):
UH interpretation of discussions of this particular constellation, and he's
a sauce also associated with the Polades star cluster and
the fire drill method of fire production. This would be
a friction based method for forgetting a fire going right
for Yeah, it would involve a setup for rapidly rotating
(24:31):
one piece of wood on another to generate heat through
friction that would help spark some kindling. Yeah. We we
discussed this a bit in our fire Technology series of
invention episodes. This would have been a very early way
to produce fire. And you also see Prometheus type characters
and other religions and traditions that that are closely associated
(24:53):
with the fire drill. I've seen the Chinese version of
this as being referred to in translation as the fire driller.
So it makes sense that that the primordial connection with
fire production would be tied in with this technology. Now
there's also there also does seem to be a connection
as well between Scholatl and Venus appearing in the in
(25:15):
the night sky as a morning star. Again, we're getting
into this idea that that this deity and or the
dog carry the fire through the underworld, carry the sun
through the underworld. And so this gets into the idea
of like where does Venus go? Where does the sun
go when it is not in the sky? Well, it
is of course traveling beneath the earth, it is traveling
(25:38):
through the underworld. So um, in all of this, I
have to stress that I'm I'm not giving full justice
to the complexity and richness of Aztec astrology here. Whole
books have been written about Aztec astrology, uh and and it.
But it seems that that there are complex astrological associations
between dogs and death and fire, and that the has
(26:00):
worked in unison with less abstract aspects of the dog's
nature and role in society and it's just overall value
to humanity. Now in in my In traditions, as reflected
in the Mayan codices, the dog is also the firebringer.
I was reading about this in The Dragon and the Dog,
Two Symbols of Time in Non All Religion by Frank J. Newman.
(26:25):
Newman writes, quote, the dog is often depicted in the
Maya codices carrying a torch, perhaps a reference to the
Maya tradition that the dog brought fire to mankind, and
the head of a dog is sometimes part of the
compound glyph which represents the fire drill. Okay, so, if
I'm understanding everything I've been looking at here, it sounds
as if we have a few things going on sort
(26:47):
of feeding into each other. First of all, astrological associations
between dogs and fire. Uh. Secondly mythological connotations of the
dog or dog headed deities as firebringers. And then connections
some mythological and some astrological connecting dogs to the dead
and to the realm of the dead. And on top
of that, though, I think perhaps some manner of bleed
(27:08):
over between control of fire as a major factor in
human civilization and the importance of the domestic dog which
again in this context, would have served pretty much all
of the values placed on the domestic dog in the
modern context you know, companion, guardian, etcetera, with the added
context of being the their only domesticated mammalian protein source.
(27:30):
You know, again, they did not have the domesticated cow,
the domesticated pig, all of these these other creatures to
help provide the nutrition they needed. The dog was the
only domestic mammal that could fulfill that that need. I've
also read that at least in some Mesoamerican traditions and accounts,
the dog is credited with discovering corn, which would would
(27:52):
also be a huge achievement on par with fire in
some regards. Uh. So, so again we see these multiple
connections here that that's speak to the dog's role in civilization,
like the fact that humans have mastery over things that
enable them to to build civilizations and to keep going
year after year. Uh, and to pass on something to
(28:13):
to their children. Uh, it's the fire, it's the crops
that are key, but also the dog. Yeah, this is
a fascinating triangle that sort of says something about about
the human species. Of the triangle of humans, dogs and
fire and uh, and so I wanted to transition from
here to look at a little bit of the scientific
(28:35):
evidence and and current leading hypotheses about the history of
the relationship between humans and these two elements of nature
and of of technology, in fact of fire, end of
dogs UM. So one of the things I wanted to
start off with here is remembering an interesting fact from
some of our past episodes. We did a couple of
episodes about UM about the history of fire on planet Earth,
(28:59):
and and the observation is this Earth is sometimes thought
of as the water planet, which is a good descriptor
there's a lot of liquid water on our surface, but
I think it's also quite reasonable to think of Earth
as the fire planet. Earth is really the only place
in the Solar System that allows for fire, certainly in
significant amounts, because in order to burn fire needs heat,
(29:23):
fuel and oxygen. And there are plenty of places in
the Solar System where you can find lots of heat,
but fuel and free oxygen are much more scarce. The
Earth is absolutely packed with these two things. It is
packed with fuel in the form of concentrated carbon molecules
produced by the biosphere, and it is packed with free oxygen.
(29:44):
And the atmosphere, which is also produced by the biosphere.
So so the conditions giving rise to the potential for
free burning fires actually are very much a product of
Earth's biology, the presence of life on Earth. Beyond that,
another interesting thing that makes it Earth the fire planet
is that, like humans don't have to be there to
start fires, Earth's weather systems naturally provide the flint that
(30:07):
continually strikes natural fires in the form of lightning. So
Earth is a place where where fire is not only possible,
but fire occurs. Right now, to come back to what
we were talking about earlier, Yes, Earth has fire, Earth
has dogs, but you really don't see a lot of
crossover between the two. Um In addition to what I
mentioned earlier, I mean, the most I really came across
(30:29):
was the idea that, yes, dogs will warm themselves by fires,
be at a camp fire or even some other form
of fire. There are situations where dogs have been observed
to take advantage of that heat, but other than that
there they don't seem to really interact with fire much,
which makes sense most you know, most species, even those
that have a life cycle that depends on periodic burns.
(30:50):
It doesn't mean that their anatomy is has has evolved
to actually deal with the reality of fire. Right then. Now,
there are some examples we've discussed before on the show
of animals appearing to, at least according to some reports,
make direct use of fire. For example, the fire hawks
of of Australia, which have been alleged to uh say,
(31:12):
use burning sticks to start fires to drive out prey
animals that they can then swoop down an attack. Um
I could not find any evidence of any species of Canada,
or any carnivore mammal for that matter, doing anything like this,
So so this does not appear to be something that
happens at nature in nature, at least on a regular basis.
But this did get me thinking about the history of
(31:35):
human domestication of fire and of human domestication of dogs,
both of which are fascinating and contentious subjects deep in
our past. Um So a few facts. First of all,
while there's a lot we don't know about both of
these subjects, I do think it's very clear that our
human ancestors domesticated fire long before they domesticated dogs. So
(32:00):
for a few facts about the general timeline of fire
development among ancient humans and human ancestors. I was looking
at a paper published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal
Society b Biological Sciences from twenty sixteen by a professor
of archaeology at the University of Liverpool named John Gaulet,
and it's called the discovery of fire by humans a
(32:22):
long and convoluted process. So in summarizing the existing evidence,
Galllet writes that finding evidence of fire use by really
ancient humans and human ancestors is sometimes difficult, right because
fire is not like it's not like a stone artifact,
though it does leave physical traces that you can on cover.
And he writes that by about one point five million
(32:43):
years ago, there are a number of sites occupied by
our hominan ancestors that show signs of burned material consistent
with deliberate fire use. Now, one point five million years
ago is a long time ago, but but this far
back the evidence is somewhat inconsistent. And it's worth noting
that the presence of fire at a human or or
(33:04):
hominin camp site is not necessarily evidence of the ability
to strike fire from nothing, say, by using a fire
drill or flint and tinder box or anything like that.
Human humans and human ancestors probably captured and preserved fires
from nature long before we had reliable fire striking methods.
(33:25):
But Galllet writes that by the time of the Middle Pleistocene,
so that would be between about three quarters of a
million years ago and about a hundred and twenty five
thousand years ago. H quote recognizable hearths demonstrate a social
and economic focus on many sites, so the Middle Pleistocene
seems to be pretty widely accepted as a time by
(33:46):
which fire use became widespread and common among humans. Now.
As wonderful as dogs are, fire is probably more pivotal
to human history and evolution. It's it's necessary for the
development of almost all post Stone Age technology, So all
technologies based on metal involve the use of fire and
their creation. Basically, all technologies after the Neolithic period would
(34:10):
need fire in order to be made. That this reminds
me of the quote that outside of a dog, a
book is man's best friend, but inside of a dog
it's too dark to read. You need to fire. Yeah,
Mark's brother, so yeah, you need the fire. But even
past the role of fire in creating a lot of
later stages of human technology, it's even been hypothesized that
(34:32):
fire has played major roles in in changes to human biology,
and this is not something that's known for sure, but
there are a number of theories that involve the intersection
of fire and changes to humans are our ourselves our
own biology. So one major example is the cooking hypothesis,
which I think we've alluded to on the show before.
Maybe someday we should devote a full episode to that
(34:54):
talk about some of the evidence for and against. But
this is a hypothesis put forward by a British anth
apologist and primatologists named Richard Wrangham, which argues that there
is a link between the invention of cooking, which necessitates fire,
and the shape of modern human bodies guts and brains
and in rangum zone. Words from a paper dealing with
(35:17):
some of the more recent evidence foreign against this hypothesis quote.
The cooking hypothesis posits that control of fire leads to
such a large increase in energy acquisition and that means
through eating and reduces the physical challenges of eating food
so greatly that the evolution of an obligation to incorporate
(35:38):
cooked food into the diet should be recognizable by evidence
of novel digestive adaptations and increased energy use. Yeah, we
have to remember that with cooking, we're talking about to
a very large degree, the externalization of human digestion. Things
that previously, if we were going to digest it, it
was all going to have to happen inside of us.
(35:59):
Now we could, we could take steps towards the acquisition
of those nutrients, sometimes nutrients that would not be available
to us if we did not cook them. We're able
to do that outside the human body, right, I mean
as sort of central to what Rangum is saying here
is that subsisting entirely on a raw food diet versus
subsisting on a cooked food diet, that is such a
(36:20):
huge difference that you would expect basically different kinds of animals.
That is a gigantic adaptation that would change. It would
change the way your mouth needs to work. You would
need to devote way less energy to having a strong
jaw for chewing and crushing. It would change the way
your gut needs to work. And of course the body
could maybe spend that energy on other things. And like
(36:40):
I said, maybe we should come back and do a
whole episode on that someday, because yeah, I was looking
at some of the arguments foreign against this, and it
seems like an interesting debate. But so not to say
that the cooking hypothesis is necessarily correct, But I do
think it's inarguable that fire is a major part of
the development of all human and culture and shapes our
(37:01):
lives tremendously. So some use of fire by human ancestors
probably goes back more than a million years. Uh, the
use of fire was common among human ancestors at least
a few hundred thousand years ago by most estimates. The
domestication of dogs seems to be roughly in order of
magnitude more recent. So if common use of fire goes
(37:24):
back at least a few hundred thousand years, domestication of
dogs seems to go back in the past few tens
of thousands of years than now. On the scientific evidence
for the history of the domestication of dogs. There's also
a lot of disagreement here. But there was one recent
(37:45):
development I've actually been wanting to talk about on the
show for a bit, and this gives us a good
chance to do it today. So there was a paper
that was published just earlier this year by Angela our
period all published in p N a se called dog
domestication and the dual dispersal of people and dogs into
the Americas. And this was a paper that was trying
(38:07):
to settle some some ongoing debates and outstanding questions about
the history of dog domestication and how that relates to
the history of human migration over the continents. And so
this study tried to use DNA evidence from both dogs
and humans to try to trace the history of the
relationship between the two and uh according to the authors here,
(38:30):
their findings suggests quote that dogs were domesticated in Siberia
by about twenty three thousand years ago, possibly while both
people and wolves were isolated during the harsh climate of
the last Glacial Maximum. Dogs then accompanied the first people
into the Americas and traveled with them as humans rapidly
(38:51):
dispersed into the continent beginning about fifteen thousand years ago.
So I was reading a really good write up of
this new paper by David Grimm in Science that fills
in some more context on this and give some texture
to it. So um, according to the model put forward
by the study, Grim rights that the people who domesticated
dogs probably lived in the area of northeastern Siberia, during
(39:15):
the later part of the last glacial period the Last
Ice Age, and these would have been human hunter is
using stone tipped weapons who probably subsisted on megafauna like
bison and wooly mammoths, and the wolf like ancestors of
modern dogs may have actually been helping these humans in
their hunting. And then from here from this ancestral population
(39:38):
in northeastern Siberia, the descendants of these proto dogs went
both east and west with their human companions, so east
into the Americas and then west into Eurasia. So the
team behind the study, they relied on physical evidence in
the form of mitochondrial DNA from a human and dog remains.
(39:59):
Mitochondrial DNA is more readily preserved over time and say
fossil remains and animal remains than DNA from the nucleus
of cells, and they concluded that all lineages of dogs
that accompanied the first human settlers into North America shared
a common ancestor that was indicated by a genetic marker
called A to B, and the researchers believe these dogs
(40:23):
to have descended from this common ancestor population that were
these domesticated or semi domesticated dogs born in the company
of humans in North Siberia about twenty three thousand years ago.
Now imagining the sort of setting of this ancestral population
of of wolves turning into dogs and the humans that
(40:43):
we're creating them. Uh, the setting here is is something
like twenty three to thirty one thousand years ago in
this area of northeastern Siberia that Grim Rights was apparently
relatively temperate compared to the areas all around it, and
it was that way for thousands of years. So you
have to imagine a place that during a an ice
(41:05):
age is surrounded on the east and the west by
regions that are probably too cold and barren to sustain
the lifestyle of of these human hunter gatherers, and so
basically they would have been isolated in these hunting grounds
in northeastern Siberia that it was kind of an oasis
in which they could live. And there were also populations
of wolves occupying this relative oasis in in the last
(41:28):
glacial period along with these human hunters. Now we'll come
back to that oasis concept in a minute, but first
I wanted to mention that we're not sure how exactly
the domestication of dogs happened. You know, you want to
be careful not to put too much confidence in people
trying to tell a plausible story that could explain things,
because we don't know for sure. But there's a common
(41:50):
hypothesis on the domestication process leading from the wolf to
the domestic dog that seems pretty plausible, and it goes
like this. So you have humans who are hunting and
gathering food and maybe making these large mega fauna kills.
You know, they're killing a wooly mammoth or a bison
or something and roasting meat over the fire at campsites,
(42:11):
and wild wolves are obviously drawn to the smell of
the food that humans have harvested. And then from here
it's possible that a selection process kicks in and it
would go something like this. Wolves that are too skittish
around humans, they just don't you know, they keep their distance.
You know, they don't want anything to do with humans.
Humans are too scary, uh, they stay back. Obviously, any
(42:33):
wolves that were too aggressive or violent about approaching humans
would react with with violence, and probably those wolves would
be killed. But wolves that happen to have behavioral predispositions
causing them to approach humans but not approach aggressively would
probably get to share in some of the scraps at
the human campsite. They would somehow get by their proximity
(42:56):
to human encampments, get to maybe I don't know, gavenge
the remains or maybe non the bones that the humans
tossed away, or maybe even humans would deliberately share with them,
you know, who knows. And sort of imagine how that
there could be a crossover between the two, like from
toleration to perhaps active feeding over time. You know, it
(43:17):
is conclar that these dogs are not a threat, and hey,
maybe they're actually amusing. Maybe they're interesting to look at, uh,
and and everything can build up from there. Sure, and
so again, if this hypothesis is in any way correct,
these brave but docile scavengers, the dogs, the wolves who
would approach but wouldn't be aggressive, they would benefit from
(43:37):
the extra food rewards they would get from proximity to
these human campsites, and from that extra food they would
have a survival advantage, and over generations there would be
these populations of wolf like creatures or proto dogs, these
canids who would essentially have bred themselves to become friendly
companions to humans. At some point, the human would probably
(44:00):
have found out that these proto dogs were useful for
hunting and maybe even for friendship and so forth. So again, uh,
you know, we don't know that this is how it happened,
but this is a commonly entertained, plausible history of what
could have happened here. And it's interesting that if there's
anything to this hypothesis, the process that led to the
(44:22):
creation of dogs was in part their ancestors willingness to
walk towards the fire. Yeah. Yeah, the dog that tolerates
the heat, the light, the dog that that steps into
the glow of the fire. Yeah. That article by David
Graham and Science actually quotes one of the collaborators on
the study, and archaeologist named David Meltzer, who I believe
(44:44):
is on on faculty at Southern Methodist University. Uh And
and his quote is great. He says, these people were
probably sleeping on the ground in furs, roasting fresh kills
on the fire. If you're a hungry carnivore and you
smell a mammoth barbecue, you're going to check it out.
And so yeah, I like the idea that, you know,
maybe in the same way that cooking changed humans, something
(45:06):
cooking could have possibly played a role in the attraction
of these wolf like ancestors of modern dogs. Yeah, and
I find it interesting to think about this and then
think about, you know, the end result with with mine
and Aztec situation civilization. To imagine these Eurasian people's moving
(45:26):
across the world, uh over into North America and then
downward towards mes of American South America, and what did
they bring with them? You know, obviously they brought their
cultures and their traditions and their knowledge, but they but
they brought with them the fire, and they brought with
them the dog. You know, a lot of the other
things they may have brought with them in the short
term would have given way to new crops that the
(45:50):
new plants they might discover, new animals they might discover.
But the fire and the dog were certainly constants. Now,
one last thing I wanted to come back to with
this study from earlier this year. There's one possible catch
in this, this hypothetical process by which the earliest ancestors
of dogs were created. It might be kind of problematic
(46:10):
to imagine that nomadic humans who are moving all over
the place to to follow, say their prey animals, you know,
they're the nomadic human hunters could have created these dogs
because they would be moving and so encountering probably new
population of wolves wherever they went, so that there might
not be enough repeated exposure to the same populations of
(46:32):
wolves to create the dogs. But one of the things
put forward in this study is that it would have
had this sort of oasis place in in northeastern Siberia
that was surrounded on all sides by more harsh environments.
So you would have the humans staying in a relatively
stable location and wolf populations staying in the same uh
place with them, So you'd have them just interacting in
(46:55):
close quarters for thousands of years at a time, and
this could have given the opportunity to actually kick off
and sustain this breeding process turning wolves into dogs. Huh. Interesting.
You know, all of this reminds me of of another
little piece that came up because in a weird way,
it has a little bit of the of the Catholic traditions,
(47:15):
certainly has some of the Mayan traditions, but also some
of these ideas we've been discussing dealing with the hypothesis
of of of dog domestication I was reading in E. J.
Silawowski's The Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception, Volume
six and M and I just want to read this
little quote from it. Here. Morris Siegel, to demonstrate the
(47:37):
fusion of Spanish, Catholic, and Mayan Indian traits in the
religions of Indians and modern Western Guatemala, recounts a cultured
creation story he recorded there in nineteen forty one in
which the child God, which the author says equals Jesus
in this scenario, son of our virgin mother, gathered together
(47:58):
the meat bones from his uncle's feast, planted them, and
built a corral around the place. In three days, all
the animals in the world had grown from the buried bones,
and the uncle's jealous opened the corral and released the animals.
Yet the dog was one of the few that remained,
whether willingly or simply out of a failure to escape
(48:21):
to live with human beings. WHOA I like that because
it again it kind of gets into an idea about
the dog, like the does the dog stick with us
because it is clever or because it is dumb? Because
the dog is and I think it's ultimately neither of those.
But you know that the idea that, like, why is
the dog the animal that seems closest to us, that is,
(48:43):
that is man's best friend. But then also this account
involves slaughter at a campsite, you know, it involves the
bones of the dead, So we get that connection to
this idea of the dog as the as having an
innate connection to the realms beyond death, but also this
connection to human cooking. Yeah, totally. I also like the
(49:04):
way that this I don't know this, something about this
vision of the dog makes it both the most and
least mysterious of creatures. You know, It's like the most
familiar but also has one of the most intriguing histories
that we you know, is somewhat obscure to us. Yeah. Yeah,
the idea that like the dog has just the dog
is there. The dog has remained there. Uh, even if
(49:25):
you don't want the dog anymore, the dog will will stay,
which is kind of reflected in this story. To the
jealous uncles are like, get these animals, Get these animals
out of here hanging out around our bones. The dog
doesn't go. The dog is here to stay. But I
have to say, I do really like this idea of
the dog is the firebringer and the dog and dog
is the dog carrying the fire for humanity, lighting the
(49:47):
way for us into the dark. Because this does seem
to just it, it's kind of lines up with a
lot of the the attributes that we we recognize in
our relationships with our pets. Know, I mean, particularly with
the dog. You know this, this is our buddy, This
is he's a guide, He's a guardian and and perhaps
has esoteric knowledge of the great beyond. All dogs are wizards. Yeah, yeah,
(50:13):
And so the next time you're you're making eye contact
with your dog, just remember this animal knows the way
to Micklin. Now, obviously we'd love to hear from everyone
out there, especially dog owners. I'm sure you have some
thoughts on all of this. I do want to drive
home the Please do not try and give your dog
anything on fire because of anything you heard in this episode.
(50:33):
We're certain your dog doesn't want any part of the fire,
and only disaster can occur if you try to recreate
these artistic and mythic images um using an actual canine. Yes, children,
do not try to recreate an active dog py romancy
you heard about on this podcast. However, I will just
(50:55):
throw this out there. If you want to get a
dog toy that looks like a torch or a flame brand,
they do exist, you can, but you can find them.
I'm looking at a couple of varieties of these right now.
So if you are inspired by this podcast and you
want pictures of your dog holding a flaming brand, uh,
you know, bringing some sort of vision to humanity. Uh yeah,
just go spend nine to seventeen dollars and get yourself
(51:18):
a chew toy torch. Are these are these two toys
merch created by the Dominicans. Um, I know van gift shop.
Let's see. I see one that is labeled as Frisco
Mythical Mates of Viking torch plus Squeaking dog toy. It
sounds lovely and it's available for like Okay, I don't
(51:39):
know why it's a Viking thing. Like the Vikings didn't
come up in this podcast at all. It needs to
be connected to the Mayans or to uh to to Catholics.
Needs to be a Frisco Mythical Mates Catholic torch plus
squeaking dog toy or something. All right, we're gonna go
and close this one. Out, but yeah, certainly right in
let us know. Tell us about your dog and if
(52:02):
you have a dog that has one of these, uh,
these two toys, yes, I would like to see a
picture of the two together. In the meantime, if you
want to listen to other episodes of Stuff to Blow
Your Mind, just check out the Stuff to Blow Your
Mind podcast feed. You can find that wherever you get
your podcasts. We have core episodes publishing Tuesdays and Thursdays.
We have a listener mail on Monday, we have an
artifact on Wednesday, and we have a Weird House CINAM
(52:24):
on Friday. That's our time to just talk about a
weird movie and set the science mostly aside for the
time being now and then we have a rerun on
the weekends. Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio
producers Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get
in touch with us with feedback on this episode or
any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or
just to say hello, you can email us at contact
that Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcam. Stuff to Blow
(52:54):
Your Mind is production of I Heart Radio. For more
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