Recently, Samuel Belknap III, a University of Maine graduate student, was researching the diet and nutrition of ancient people who lived in what is now Texas. While examining their, um, waste, he came across a small bone that it turns out came from a dog that lived 9,400 years ago.
Since the bone was found in human excrement, it shows that these early canines were eaten by people. This may sound strange and horrible to us, but back then man did what he needed to to survive. Thankfully now we have grocery stores.
It’s pretty amazing how long pups have been around. The Palm Beach Post reports, “There are archaeological records of dogs going back 31,000 years from a site in Belgium, 26,000 years in the Czech Republic and 15,000 years in Siberia,” according to Robert Wayne, a professor of evolutionary biology at UCLA and a dog evolution expert.
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Photo by Tom Coppen via Flickr.