What is believed to be the skeleton of one of the world’s oldest domesticated dogs has been identified by an Israeli scientist. Found in a human grave excavated two years ago by a French team of archaeologists, the dog’s rem### were identified by Simon Davis, a doctoral student at the Hebrew University’s zoology department. The discovery is likely to shed new light on the mores of ancient Canaanite communities.
Found in a tomb in the Galilee, the dog is thought to have been a three-to-five-month-old puppy. It supports the hypothesis that man had already domesticated dogs 12 millennia ago. Davis, 29, came to Israel from Britain as an undergraduate and has remained here working in research at the Hebrew University. His supervising professor, Eitan Tchernov, said the domestication of dogs as exampled in this find seems to have preceded that of other animals by some 3000 years.
Tchernov’s theory is that dogs were used to help with hunting, and that primitive man, therefore, found it unnecessary to domesticate today’s farm-yard animals for food purposes. Some 9000 years ago, according to the evidence, sheep and goat herding began, and this was followed by cow herding and lastly, horse and donkey domestication. Tchernov believes the Jordan Valley basin was the area of man’s earliest experimentation in the field of animal domestication.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
