14 DAY TRIAL // Investigators at the Pennsylvania State University argue in a new paper that our love and compassion for all furry creatures may have had a very important influence on how we evolved, as a species. They say that our pets may have been one of the driving forces that made humans learn language and other hallmarks we now associate with civilization. The “animal connection” has been noticed to exist in other species as well, when monkeys for example adopt dog cubs, and tigers adopt young piglets.
“The animal connection runs through the whole [human history] and connects the other big evolutionary leaps, including stone tools, language and domestication. Instead of being isolated discoveries, there's a theme here. It's very deep and very old, “ says Pat Shipman, a Penn State paleoanthropologist. The expert highlights the fact that no other species is capable of showing the same level of affection and dedication to members of an outgroup as humans can. We can adopt every type of animal from bunnies and horses and jaguars and dolphins. Such a diversity does not exist in nature, where cases of adoption are the exception, rather than the norm.
In the case of humans, most families have some sort of pet, most commonly a dog or a cat. While this may seem natural in the developed world, the habit of keeping animals close by has actually been with our species for millennia, since the first dogs and horses were domesticated. A major shift in our civilization occurred when our ancestors figured out that they could draw more benefits from using domesticated animals as tools than they did from keeping them as food sources and companions. Dogs for example started fulfilling a very specific task, being charged with protecting both human communities and herds of cows, or flock of sheep.
Details of the new investigating conducted at Penn State appear in the August 2010 issue of the esteemed scientific journal Current Anthropology. “You see homeless people on the streets with pets, and people in dire circumstances keeping pets. That suggests there's something humans get out of it, which is pretty old,” Shipman tells LiveScience. The expert takes note of an interesting statistic, which shows that more households in the United States have pets than children.
“If you have a dog that can hunt, you don't need to turn into a fast-moving animal with sharp teeth. If you're storing grains [known to attract rodents], you don't need to evolve claws and an intense focus to kill rats, [because] you have cats that do it for you,” Shipman says of some of the reasons that may have compelled humans to keep domesticated animals close by.