David Ian Howe
speaker
136 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
David Ian Howe’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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My name is David Ian Howe. He, him.
Yeah, it's exciting. It's definitely an ology. I guess technically ethnocynology falls under umbrella of anthropology to me. But I was just so into dogs and I did a whole bunch of research and all my term papers were on dogs. And I was looking to see like, is there a specific study of dogs in human context?
So it's not like something you can major in, but it technically is the Greek word for what I'm talking about.
Yeah. I went to school for hunter-gatherer archaeology, and I studied stone tools mainly as my thesis. And I wanted to go get my PhD for this specifically, but there's no school that has a specific... We studied dog archaeology program, you know, and that's difficult.
Constantly.
Yeah. Or like, where do you teach? How do I be a student? And I was like, I don't, but I will say Dr. Angela Perry is a archeologist and she does a lot of this dog archeology and she's like a wizard with that and can do all the genetic aspects and a lot of stuff that she publishes is like kind of what people would like want to read.
All of my term papers in those classes were focused on dogs. But doing that, looking for dogs that live around humans, you can also study all of those subjects equally with dogs. And just I found so much information. It was overwhelming.
Yeah.
Yeah, a lot of digs. You can find specific sites that have dogs at it. But what really intrigued me was reading old ethnographies from either the French or the Spanish or the English when they got here. Or just the Bureau of Ethnology went out in the early 1900s just documenting whatever was left of indigenous cultures. And there's a wealth of information in there because...
Without the horse or cows or, you know, any other animals, the dog was crucial to life for Indigenous Americans here. And just so much. And every culture kind of has dogs or something that they do, or at least they live there.
Debated topic. Very debated. Let's break it down. But I would say humans leave Africa, we get to Eurasia, specifically Siberia, and you're interacting with wolves who are an equally social and intelligent predator. So you're going to be running into each other. They both hunt caribou a lot, especially in that area.
And I would say that whole time, like the domestication process is happening. But we can see like the dog as we genetically know it today appears 20,000 years ago in East Asia, Siberia.
I guess two answers to that. In that East Asia, Siberia area where people are... you know, domesticating dogs, or you could say wolves are self-domesticating around hominid camps. People then go to the Americas, either across the land bridge or down the coast, whatever theory you subscribe to.
And that's how dogs ended up in the Americas and the only like domestic animal there until turkeys and llamas later. But the rest of the world, you can see dogs are traded kind of like a commodity and you can see dog genetic lines being traded across Eurasia into Africa.
And to answer the question fully, I would say like the Neolithic, when we go from hunting and gathering to that more sedentary lifestyle with a bigger population, dogs just kind of boom around then.
And there's so much I could answer there.
Dogs eating, or I could say early dogs, wolves eating scraps around human camps would help deter predators in itself. Wolves don't necessarily bark. Non-domestic wolves don't bark, but once dogs started barking, we were breeding for that. They would alert for different predators.
But certainly hunting, that's probably the first thing. Because we were probably finding wolves hunting and then just stealing their kill. Or vice versa, the wolves would try to steal a human kill. But that interaction was happening. But yeah, hunting, sentinels, like garden camps. And then, especially in the Americas, we know dogs were being used to help pull loads before the horse.
They would wear little backpacks to help collect shellfish and berries and all that. And... In some areas, they were used for their wool or their fur, I should say. And then this one's always kind of dicey, but just until like, you know, 1980, dogs are kind of just eaten all over the world as a food source, usually out of like a ceremonial purpose.
Right.
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