![]() “Remove domestication from the human species, and there’s probably a couple of million of us on the planet, max,” says the archaeologist and geneticist Greger Larson. We raised puppies well before we raised kittens or chickens before we herded cows, goats, pigs, and sheep before we planted rice, wheat, barley, and corn before we remade the world. Dogs were the first domesticated animals, and their barks heralded the Anthropocene. Today, dogs are such familiar parts of our lives-our reputed best friends and subject of many a meme-that it’s easy to take them, and what they represent, for granted. They learned to read the complex expressions that ripple across human faces. They gained a docile disposition, becoming both less frightening and less fearful. The wolves changed in body and temperament. The fates of our two species became braided together. Tens of thousands of years ago, before the internet, before the Industrial Revolution, before literature and mathematics, bronze and iron, before the advent of agriculture, early humans formed an unlikely partnership with another animal-the grey wolf.
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