Dogs, mankind: 40,000 years of love

I thought I had an "old dog" story from my childhood: Calico, the leg-humping beagle who would have turned 50 last spring had she not been taken too soon.

Calico was old. She lived to be 15, despite being obese and hideously out of shape.

But it turns out that Calico was far from an old dog. So was George Washington's dog. Or any dog from the time of Jesus (think there was a generation of dogs named "Judas" in the late first century?).

Heck, a dog in ancient Greece can't be considered an old dog.

That's because research published in the journal Current Biology suggests that dogs were "man's best friend" as far back as 40,000 years ago.

Our relationship with dogs goes back 400 centuries! That goes back to when (according to my estimate) your great-great-great-great grandparents were alive.

The old-dog theory comes from science: An ancient bone discovered in Siberia.

Without getting too scientific (which would require me to learn), researchers say the Siberian bone shows that dogs and wolves split long before originally thought – with dogs becoming pets.

In that way, the dog-wolf split is like your aunt and uncle, who have been living apart for a decade, but still came to family events together, acting like they were a couple. Finally, they admitted that they lived in different places.

Dogs and wolves now admit they split up.

There was no real reason given for the dog-wolf split, but one scientist said it was because of creative differences. A rival group of scientists insist that it was due to Yoko Ono.

I think that's just unfair. I suspect dogs and wolves were simply forerunners to Sammy Hagar and David Lee Roth. Or Jim Harbaugh and the 49ers. They just had to go different directions.

But that doesn't really matter. This does: Dogs appear to have been close to mankind 40,000 years ago, which goes back to the year 37,885 B.C., three years before Betty White was born.

A young Betty White may have had a dog!

Like many scientific discoveries, this timeline is an estimate. Scientists can't say for sure when humans began domesticating dogs, but sources say that further evidence suggests that an ancient man named "Grog" had a dog – there are drawings on a cave wall of a stick figure with a sad face picking up dog poop. "Grog hate poop" is written in ancient text.

Is that true? I'm not sure. But I'm not not sure, either. It's possible.

If you love your dog, take heart. Humans have loved dogs for a long time.

We have 40,000 years of telling them to stop barking, 40,000 years of arranging for someone to watch them while we vacation (or hunt/gather), 40,000 years of taking them for walks, 40,000 years of saying (in a variety of languages) "who's a good dog?"

If that seems like a long time, consider what it seems like to dogs.

Since they age seven years for every year we do, it is 280,000 years to them.

Or, in dog terms, "more than two."

They still haven't learned how to count beyond that after 40,000 years. That's because you can't teach old dogs . . . . Well, you know.

So did Grog.

Brad Stanhope is a former Daily Republic editor. Reach him at bradstanhope@hotmail.com.