What Mark Twain actually said in his famous quote was “the more I learn about people, the more I like my dog” but I didn’t think he’d mind if I changed a word or two as a segway to addressing a comment I often hear people make about their general disillusionment with some or all people.
To properly address the issue, we need to go back a few years or 3.7 billion of them to be exact.
The species that you and I belong to is Homo Sapiens. Around 300,000 years ago, Homo Sapiens in roughly our current format lived in Africa, in small family groups of between 10 and 100 individuals, doing our best to respond to rapidly changing and probably quite dramatic climatic conditions.
For more than 60 million years, another creature had also been living in small groups, a wolf-like animal that 1 million years ago evolved into Canis lupus or the grey wolf and 130,000 years ago, into Canis familiaris or the domestic dog.
For the next 100,000 or so years, what would become the domestic dog, lived in various parts of the world including northern Eurasia which at the time was covered in ice sheets. Around the peak of the last ice ago, which was about 15,000 – 20,000 years ago, it’s suggested that dogs began to be domesticated when they they started approaching human camps in search of food.
They weren’t the only ones struggling to find food, everyone was feeling the pinch, including humans, who, at one time got down to just 8,000 breeding pairs and were staring down the barrel of extinction themselves. According to a researcher at the University of Bath, the humans who survived until conditions improved, were the ones with dogs.
For the next 8,000 or so years, humans and dogs co-existed in small groups as hunter gatherers, in much the same way as they had evolved to do separately, but now, more effectively together.
Around 12,000 BCE, things changed for everyone with the start of the first agricultural revolution which saw people settling in one place, starting in Mesopotamia, the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in what is now Iran. Humans started to live differently than they had for the last 280,000 years, in groups that got progressively larger, growing lots of the same kinds of foods rather than gathering small bits of different food on their travels.
When we think of human history, we only tend to think of the last 2,000 years or so but that’s just a drop in the evolutionary ocean. 2,000 compared to 300,000 is like two paces compared to a stroll from Perth to Southern Cross via Northam, Kellerberrin and Merredin.
According to the Smithsonian, the earliest forms of life were microbes, microscopic organisms whose detectable traces have been found in rocks where they were left about 3.7 billion years ago.
2,000 years compared to 3.7 billion years is like 2 paces compared to 45 times around the earth.
We have evolved in ways we can’t see or understand, it’s only now that science is unravelling some of the mysteries for us. For example, when you think of a human infant, what do you think of? A creature with a large head relative to its body and wide, innocent looking eyes? We know that adult humans are sub-consciously drawn to those characteristics, and over thousands of years of domestication, dogs have developed movable eyebrows that allow them to make those same puppy dog eyes that we find so cute and to make eye contact with humans when they’re looking for guidance? Even though dogs are directly descended from wolves, wolves don’t have the same facial muscles around their eyes that dogs now do, and they don’t make eye contact with humans in the same way that dogs will.
Another example of animals willing to coexist with humans are horses, which were domesticated around 7,000 years ago and it’s not hard to see why they would have been an attractive proposition for humans.
In a study done in Arizona to determine whether a humans could affect the heart rate variability of a horse through focussed attention, a researcher – with heart rate monitor graphs to support her claims – demonstrated how the heart rate of a human in close proximity to a group of horses, dropped to a frequency not normally seen in humans, but common in horses.
Synchronising heart rates is a defence mechanism in horses when resting in groups. One horse acts as a lookout and when that horse spots danger, it alerts the other members of the group through a change in the electrical impulses generated from their large heart, which can be detected from a few feet away.
That peaceful feeling many people report when they’re around their horses might now have a more logical explanation.
Belonging to groups is important to humans and loneliness is now seen as a greater predictor of early mortality than smoking or alcohol. But we don’t need millions of people to keep us healthy and happy, we only need a handful.
And we know that social bonds are just as important to dogs and many other pack or herd animals as they are to us. When separated from their pack, African Wild Dog become depressed and can die as a result of something called Broken Heart Syndrome.
Most of us don’t really dislike other people, we’re probably just better evolved to deal with a lot fewer of them at a time. Hunter gatherers could go their entire lifetime without meeting anyone not already in their family group, so when we have to interact with more people in a week than we were probably designed to cope with in our entire lifetime, it’s no wonder that we feel the way we do.
With human social interactions being as complex as they are and as easy to misunderstand, it’s not difficult to see why a dog or a horse, who we choose for qualities that suit us, can be a more attractive proposition for many, than large numbers of confusing people.
So, if your family group consists of no more than you, a friend or two and a faithful mutt or nag, then you’re right on track to be a model, modern-day hunter gatherer and successfully navigate whatever challenges may come your way.