Pat Shipman. Our Oldest Companions. The Story of the First Dog.

           

Guess why this map is here? 

With the advent of paleogenetic methodology , it was thought that the origins of all animal species can be easily established. One biologist told that the whole science of animal origins got shrunk because of the possibility to analyze ancient DNA. Not so: it turned out that with our oldest companion, the archeological data simply do not square with the paleogenetic ones. The story told by Pat Shipman is so wondrously convoluted that it may take decades to untangle all the migrations of humans with non-human animal companions (a.k.a. pets) before the era of recorded history. Her book is damn wonderful. 

P.S. Pat spends a lot of pages to prove that "domestication" of plants and animals are, in fact, two different processes. This is an Anglocentric linguistic exercise. For instance, in Russian the word similar to domestication is used principally for animals, while for the plants more frequent term is acculturation.