These days, many of us are spending a lot more time in close quarters with our cats and dogs. About half of US households have pets- millions of dogs and cats in roughly equal numbers. This week's Archaeology at Home theme celebrates the millennia-old relationship between people and their pets. So cuddle up with your furry friend and enjoy some of this week's resources!
Let's start with two podcasts:
Cat people: The Cat: In from the Wild (informative 44-minute podcast from the BBC)
Dog people: Barkology: A Brief History of Dogs (from The Dirt Podcast) - be sure to check out some of the links posted on the podcast page, which point to lots of other great resources
For those with less time, here are two fun 10-minute videos, both from the PBS Eons series:
- Cat people: How we Domesticated Cats (Twice)
- Dog people: How Dogs (Eventually) Became our Best Friends
And because everybody poops, including dogs and cats, we return to that related theme from a few weeks ago with two more resources:
Here's an article published last week in Science Mag: The Archaeological Record is Full of Dog Poop
And here's yet another great resource from AJ White: The First Pup: A 14,200 Year Old Dog (check out more of AJ's videos-- which in spite of its name are not just about poop-- on his Poopy Archaeology YouTube channel).
Finally, though it's not about cats or dogs, here is a blog post from Scientific American about the long-term Russian Fox Study, describing a link between tameness and certain physical changes in foxes over time. Then, check out the much more recent debate about this study in Science News.
This post How ancient cats lived on the brink of domestication provides an overview of the research presented in an article published in PNAS last week.
From the Human Relations Area Files (HRAF) comes this recent piece about archaeological and ethnographic evidence for human-pet relationships: Unconditional Love: Is devotion to pets a cultural universal?