Recent discoveries suggest a crucial cluster of biological & cultural innovations, probably in the millennia around 20,000 BP, and roughly in the southeast Asian region between the Yangtze and Mekong rivers. Among these were domestic dogs, vermin rats, and pottery.
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The alarm system of barking dogs helped protect people in a long-term camp or village along with the food stored in that settlement. Dogs could provide an emergency food source & may have facilitated the movement of stored food by pulling sleds.
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Coastal villages, which were likely numerous & permanent, & lived off of abundant fish & dense populations of littoral animals, have been largely lost to archaeology due to global warming & sea level rise at the end of the last glaciation.
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The abundance of littoral food sources probably gave coastal peoples more motivation than inlanders to stay longer & store more food, so they may have been the original sources of this adaptation cluster (dogs, vermin, pottery). Archaeologists only have access to inland sites.
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Long-term coastal settlements may have resembled those much later documented by travelers & ethnologists, for example the Nivkh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nivkh_people … the Kwakwakaʼwakw https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kwakwaka%CA%BCwakw … and the Yurok https://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2017/02/conflict-and-collectibles-among-yurok_87.html …
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One must be cautious about the documented observations, however, since, especially in the case of the Kwakwakaʼwakw, they were often made after their cultures had been severely disrupted by European contact.
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ht to the polymath Tim May for pointing out to me the likely importance of coastal villages as technological leaders during the millennia leading up to the dawn of agriculture.
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Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
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There were likely multiple independent domestication events. For instance The Goyet Cave "proto-dog" (36,500BP) may represent an earlier "domestication" event as scavengers of wasteful mammoth hunting practices of Cro-Magnon. This produces a different coevolutionary dynamic...
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Mobile hunting groups are different from settled groups (that, in your example, produced pottery) -- particularly when they are an "invasive species" with vast megafauna resources to hunt. Such coevolved scavengers would be less adapted to depleted game than the SE Asian dogs...
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There is some reason to believe the earliest "dog" finds were, in fact, "wolves in dog's clothing" due to phenotypic plasticity altered by human interaction with relatively minor genetic adaptation.https://www.researchgate.net/publication/299050459_A_wolf_in_dog's_clothing_Initial_dog_domestication_and_Pleistocene_wolf_variation …
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