A powerful three-minute video from the BBC.
Just another example of the wonderful abilities of our dogs.
Author: Paul Handover
Fossils
A fascinating article about the fossilisation of teeth.
Change is a constant! That’s not my saying but it is still a very good one. There are many, many articles online about the pace of change and I am not going to pick a particular one; you can do that yourself if you are interested.
But I am going to republish an article about the fossilisation of teeth. It was published on January 25th, 2023 and it was an article in The Conversation.
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Fossil teeth reveal how brains developed in utero over millions of years of human evolution – new research
Tesla Monson, Western Washington University
Fossilized bones help tell the story of what human beings and our predecessors were doing hundreds of thousands of years ago. But how can you learn about important parts of our ancestors’ life cycle – like pregnancy or gestation – that leave no obvious trace in the fossil record?
The large brains, relative to overall body size, that are a defining characteristic of our species make pregnancy and gestation particularly interesting to paleoanthropologists like me. Homo sapiens’ big skulls contribute to our difficult labor and delivery. But the big brains inside are what let our species really take off.
My colleagues and I especially wanted to know how fast our ancestors’ brains grew before birth. Was it comparable to fetal brain growth today? Investigating when prenatal growth and pregnancy became humanlike can help reveal when and how our ancestors’ brains became more like ours than like our ape relatives’.
To investigate the evolution of prenatal growth rates, we focused on the in-utero development of teeth – which do fossilize. By building a mathematical model using the relative lengths of molar teeth, we were able to track evolutionary changes in prenatal growth rates in the fossil record. Based on our model, it looks as if pregnancy and prenatal growth became more humanlike than chimplike almost 1 million years ago.
Gestation and the human brain
Pregnancy and gestation are important periods – they guide future growth and development and set the biological course for life.
But human pregnancy, and particularly labor and delivery, cost a lot of energy and are often dangerous. The large fetal brain requires a lot of nutrients during development. The rate of embryonic growth during gestation, also known as the prenatal growth rate, exacts a metabolic and physiological toll on the gestating parent. And the tight fit of the infant’s head and shoulders through the pelvic canal during delivery can lead to death, for both the mother and child.
As a trade-off to those potential downsides, there must be a really good reason to have such large heads. The justification is all the abilities that come along with having a big human brain. The evolution of our large brain contributed to our species’ dominance and is associated with increased use of technology and tools, creation of art and the ability to survive in diverse landscapes, among other advances.
The timing and sequence of events that led to the evolution of our large brains is entangled with the ability to find and process more resources, through the use of tools and cooperative group work, for example.
By investigating changes in prenatal growth, we are also investigating changes in how parents gathered food resources and distributed them to their offspring. These increasing resources would have also helped drive the evolution of an even bigger brain. Understanding more about when prenatal growth and pregnancy became humanlike at the same time reveals information about when and how our brains did too.
Humans have the highest prenatal growth rate of all primates living today, at 0.41 ounces/day (11.58 grams/day). Gorillas, for example, have a much larger adult body size than humans, but their prenatal growth rate is only 0.29 ounces/day (8.16 grams/day). Because more than a quarter of all human brain growth is completed during gestation, the rate of prenatal growth directly relates to how big an adult brain grows. How and when Homo sapiens‘ high prenatal growth rate evolved has been a mystery, until now.
What teeth can tell about prenatal growth
Researchers have spent centuries investigating variation in fossilized skeletal remains. Unfortunately brains – let alone gestation and prenatal growth rate – don’t fossilize.
But my colleagues and I started thinking about how teeth develop very, very early in utero. Your permanent adult teeth started developing long before you were born, when you were just a 20-week-old fetus. Tooth enamel is more than 95% inorganic, and the vast majority of everything we see in the vertebrate fossil record is teeth, or has teeth.
Building off this realization, we decided to investigate the relationship between prenatal growth rate, brain size and the lengths of teeth.
We measured the teeth of 608 recently living primates from skeletal collections all around the world. We compared those measurements to rates of prenatal growth that we calculated from average gestation length and mass at birth for each species. We also looked at endocranial volume – essentially how much space is inside the skull – as a proxy for brain size.
We found that the rate of prenatal growth is significantly correlated with both adult brain size and relative tooth lengths, across apes and monkeys.
Because prenatal growth is so tightly correlated with relative molar lengths, we were able to use this statistical relationship to generate a mathematical equation that predicts prenatal growth rate from teeth alone. With this equation, we can take a few molar teeth from an extinct fossil species and reconstruct exactly how fast their offspring grew during gestation.
Using our new method, we then reconstructed prenatal growth rates for 13 fossil species, building a timeline of changes over the past 6 million years of human and hominid evolution. “Hominid” describes all the species on the human side of the family tree after the split about 6 million to 8 million years ago from the common ancestor we shared with chimpanzees. From our new research, we now know that prenatal growth rates increased throughout hominid evolution, reaching a humanlike rate that exceeds what we see in all other apes less than 1 million years ago.
A fully human prenatal growth rate appeared with the evolution of our species Homo sapiens only around 200,000 years ago. But other hominid species living in the past 200,000 years, such as Neanderthals, also had “human” prenatal growth rates. Which genes were involved in these changes in growth rate remains to be investigated.
Equation means teeth now reveal even more
Even with only a few teeth and some of the jaw, a trained expert can tell countless things about an extinct individual – what species it was, what kind of diet it ate, whether it competed for mates through fighting, how old it was when it died, whether or not it had any serious health issues and more.
Now, for the first time, we can add to that list knowing what pregnancy and gestation were like for that individual and other members of its species. Teeth can even indirectly hint at the emergence of human consciousness, via evolving brain size.
Interestingly, our model suggests that prenatal growth rates started increasing well before the emergence of our Homo sapiens species. We can hypothesize that having a fast prenatal growth rate was necessary for growing that big brain and evolving human consciousness and cognitive abilities.
These are the sorts of big-picture questions this research lets us start to formulate now – all from just a few teeth.
Tesla Monson, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Western Washington University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Tesla Monson is the Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Western Washington University.
This may not make the daily headlines but, personally, I think that is a shame. The discovery has all sorts of implications for life, including ancient life, on this planet. And speaking of life let us bear a thought for the carnage that is happening in Turkey at this present time. A BBC headline:
A rescue operation is under way across much of southern Turkey and northern Syria following a huge earthquake that has killed more than 2,300 people
Picture Parade Four Hundred and Seventy-One
Unsplash with a difference.
These are all photographs of Labradors.
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Gorgeous, though I say it myself.
I missed stating this last week but copyright always exists in the original photographs.
The Role of Dog Fosters
Jess forwards another stirring account of a dog rescuer.
Jess Anderson sent me this video of a Labrador, age 19 no less, being rescued. That is one senior dog!
The video and the supporters who left comments all said how wonderful were their experiences of saving senior dogs.
The video came from the Dodo Foster Diaries and at the time of writing had had nearly 600 viewings.
There is a very good article on PetFinder about the first few days with a senior dog. Go and watch it!
How do the eyes of dogs see?
It is the last day of January and we have a post about dogs today.
I found all the non-doggie articles a bit depressing and this item seemed a delightful alternative. It is from the Curious Kids section of The Conversation but, to my mind, of interest to adults as well.
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Do dogs really see in just black and white? – Oscar V., age 9, Somerville, Massachusetts
Dogs definitely see the world differently than people do, but it’s a myth that their view is just black, white and grim shades of gray.
While most people see a full spectrum of colors from red to violet, dogs lack some of the light receptors in their eyes that allow human beings to see certain colors, particularly in the red and green range. But canines can still see yellow and blue.
Different wavelengths of light register as different colors in an animal’s visual system. Top is the human view; bottom is a dog’s eye view. Top: iStock/Getty Images Plus via Getty Images. Bottom: As processed by András Péter’s Dog Vision Image Processing Tool
What you see as red or orange, to a dog may just be another shade of tan. To my dog, Sparky, a bright orange ball lying in the green grass may look like a tan ball in another shade of tan grass. But his bright blue ball will look similar to both of us. An online image processing tool lets you see for yourself what a particular picture looks like to your pet.
Animals can’t use spoken language to describe what they see, but researchers easily trained dogs to touch a lit-up color disc with their nose to get a treat. Then they trained the dogs to touch a disc that was a different color than some others. When the well-trained dogs couldn’t figure out which disc to press, the scientists knew that they couldn’t see the differences in color. These experiments showed that dogs could see only yellow and blue.
In the back of our eyeballs, human beings’ retinas contain three types of special cone-shaped cells that are responsible for all the colors we can see. When scientists used a technique called electroretinography to measure the way dogs’ eyes react to light, they found that canines have fewer kinds of these cone cells. Compared to people’s three kinds, dogs only have two types of cone receptors.
Light travels to the back of the eyeball, where it registers with rod and cone cells that send visual signals on to the brain. iStock/Getty Images Plus via Getty Images
Not only can dogs see fewer colors than we do, they probably don’t see as clearly as we do either. Tests show that both the structure and function of the dog eye leads them to see things at a distance as more blurry. While we think of perfect vision in humans as being 20/20, typical vision in dogs is probably closer to 20/75. This means that what a person with normal vision could see from 75 feet away, a dog would need to be just 20 feet away to see as clearly. Since dogs don’t read the newspaper, their visual acuity probably doesn’t interfere with their way of life.
There’s likely a lot of difference in visual ability between breeds. Over the years, breeders have selected sight-hunting dogs like greyhounds to have better vision than dogs like bulldogs.
But that’s not the end of the story. While people have a tough time seeing clearly in dim light, scientists believe dogs can probably see as well at dusk or dawn as they can in the bright middle of the day. This is because compared to humans’, dog retinas have a higher percentage and type of another kind of visual receptor. Called rod cells because of their shape, they function better in low light than cone cells do.
Dogs also have a reflective tissue layer at the back of their eyes that helps them see in less light. This mirror-like tapetum lucidum collects and concentrates the available light to help them see when it’s dark. The tapetum lucidum is what gives dogs and other mammals that glowing eye reflection when caught in your headlights at night or when you try to take a flash photo.
Dogs share their type of vision with many other animals, including cats and foxes. Scientists think it’s important for these hunters to be able to detect the motion of their nocturnal prey, and that’s why their vision evolved in this way. As many mammals developed the ability to forage and hunt in twilight or dark conditions, they gave up the ability to see the variety of colors that most birds, reptiles and primates have. People didn’t evolve to be active all night, so we kept the color vision and better visual acuity.
Before you feel sorry that dogs aren’t able to see all the colors of the rainbow, keep in mind that some of their other senses are much more developed than yours. They can hear higher-pitched sounds from farther away, and their noses are much more powerful.
Even though Sparky might not be able to easily see that orange toy in the grass, he can certainly smell it and find it easily when he wants to.
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I don’t know about you but I found this most interesting and the last thing I would be described as is a kid!
In terms of our own dogs their ability to forage in the dark is quite amazing and, presumably, our dogs are quite typical of dogs in general.
Picture Parade Four Hundred and Seventy
Again, a variety of photographs from Unsplash.
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And the last one for today with no dogs but still a wonderful shot.
More in a week’s time.
Adding a dog to your life.
A guest post from Penny offers some advice.
Penny Martin has previously written some guest posts for Learning from Dogs and here she is again with today’s post. The subject is not directly about dogs but trying to turn around one’s life; and that is something that most of us have faced up to at some point in their past.
(I think the references to Learning from Dogs are not needed but I’m not Penny!)
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Six Simple Self-Improvement Strategies for Your Health and Career
By Penny Martin,
Published 24th January, 2023.
Are you trying to turn your life around? Focusing on improving your self-care habits, your relationships, and your career prospects can yield change your life for the better. Furthermore, Learning From Dogs can introduce you to all of the benefits of becoming a dog owner! Here’s how to invest in your education, upgrade your resume, explore business ownership, and adopt healthy routines.
Advance Your Education
If you’re looking to move up in your career, you may want to head back to school to earn another degree. It’s okay if you’re not able to commit to attending courses at a physical campus – instead, consider studying through an online degree program. This will allow you to simultaneously work and care for your family. Double-check that any online programs you’re considering are accredited and that you can easily afford the tuition. You can choose a major like marketing, education, information technology, business, healthcare administration, and more.
Update Your Resume
Perhaps you’re hunting for a new job. Make sure to revise and update your resume prior to sending out applications! To make the process easier, just pick out a free resume template from an online library – this free resume may help. Then, you’ll input your work history. Finally, you can spruce up this document with a photo or a color scheme.
Consider Entrepreneurship
What if you’re frustrated with your boss, and you feel like working at a traditional 9-to-5 job is holding you back? If you’ve got a business idea, you can always register for LLC status for limited liability and tax breaks. Remember, if you form an LLC, you’ll have to choose a registered agent who can handle communications regarding your formation documents with law firms, tax agencies, and the government. You can hire a registered agent or service for help in this area.
Health and Fitness
Even as you prioritize your career, it’s still important to take care of your physical and emotional well-being. As you plan out meals each week, The Every Girl recommends cooking with lots of leafy greens and incorporating plant-based protein into your diet. Furthermore, try to block off a few workout sessions per week in your schedule. You might want to sign up for a gym membership.
Pick Up a Good Book
Reading is a great use of your downtime, especially if you’re on a self-improvement journey! Healthline states that reading can reduce your stress levels, prevent cognitive decline, and even alleviate symptoms of depression. Plus, you’ll be able to learn more about topics that you’re interested in! You might want to choose books that cover subjects related to self-help, like nutrition, fitness, meditation, or time management.
If you feel like you don’t have time to read, consider how you could cut down on screen time. Alternatively, you could listen to audiobooks while you commute to work or do chores around the house.
Get a Dog
If you could use another companion, consider getting a dog! Owning a dog can significantly improve your mental health. Canadian Living states that having a dog around actually decreases your blood pressure, boosts your levels of mood-enhancing hormones, and even helps you make friends in your neighborhood – taking your dog for walks helps you connect with other local dog owners!
Self-improvement is a lifelong process. When you take small steps in the right direction, you’ll be able to look back in a year and feel proud of how far you’ve come. With these tips, you can earn another degree, put together an impressive resume, become a pet owner, open your own business, and more!
Are you thinking about getting a dog? Read all about the benefits on Learning from Dogs! Visit the blog today to find out why getting a dog might be right for you.
Photo via Pexels
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Thank you, Penny.
Let me publish again the opening remarks that are on the home page of this blog:
Dogs live in the present – they just are! Dogs make the best of each moment uncluttered by the sorts of complex fears and feelings that we humans have. They don’t judge, they simply take the world around them at face value. Yet they have been part of man’s world for an unimaginable time, at least 30,000 years. That makes the domesticated dog the longest animal companion to man, by far!
Learning from Dogs
I cannot put it better than that!
Putting aside the pills!
A fascinating article presents an alternative.
There was a recent item on The Conversation that is being shared with you all today. It is about the role of meditation and mindfulness is keeping one healthy, and I sense this will be a popular article!
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Meditation and mindfulness offer an abundance of health benefits and may be as effective as medication for treating certain conditions
Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neurosciences, Wayne State University
Published January 12th, 2023
Many people look to diet trends or new exercise regimens – often with questionable benefit – to get a healthier start on the new year. But there is one strategy that’s been shown time and again to boost both mood and health: meditation.
In late 2022, a high-profile study made a splash when it claimed that meditation may work as well as a common drug named Lexapro for the treatment of anxiety. Over the past couple of decades, similar evidence has emerged about mindfulness and meditation’s broad array of health benefits, for purposes ranging from stress and pain reduction to depression treatments to boosting brain health and helping to manage excessive inflammation and long COVID-19.
Despite the mounting body of evidence showing the health benefits of meditation, it can be hard to weigh the science and to know how robust it is.
I am a neuroscientist studying the effects of stress and trauma on brain development in children and adolescents. I also study how mindfulness, meditation and exercise can positively affect brain development and mental health in youth.
I am very excited about how meditation can be used as a tool to provide powerful new insights into the ways the mind and brain work, and to fundamentally change a person’s outlook on life. And as a mental health researcher, I see the promise of meditation as a low- or no-cost, evidence-based tool to improve health that can be relatively easily integrated into daily life.
Meditation requires some training, discipline and practice – which are not always easy to come by. But with some specific tools and strategies, it can be accessible to everyone.
What are mindfulness and meditation?
There are many different types of meditation, and mindfulness is one of the most common. Fundamentally, mindfulness is a mental state that, according to Jon Kabat-Zinn a renowned expert in mindfulness-based practices, involves “awareness that arises through paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgmentally.”
This means not ruminating about something that happened in the past or worrying about that to-do list. Being focused on the present, or living in the moment, has been shown to have a broad array of benefits, including elevating mood, reducing anxiety, lessening pain and potentially improving cognitive performance.
Mindfulness is a skill that can be practiced and cultivated over time. The goal is that, with repetition, the benefits of practicing mindfulness carry over into everyday life – when you aren’t actively meditating. For example, if you learn that you aren’t defined by an emotion that arises transiently, like anger, then it may be harder to stay angry for long.
The health benefits of meditation and other strategies aimed at stress reduction are thought to stem from increasing levels of overall mindfulness through practice. Elements of mindfulness are also present in practices like yoga, martial arts and dance that require focusing attention and discipline.
The vast body of evidence supporting the health benefits of meditation is too expansive to cover exhaustively. But the studies I reference below represent some of the top tier, or the highest-quality and most rigorous summaries of scientific data on the topic to date. Many of these include systematic reviews and meta-analyses, which synthesize many studies on a given topic.
Stress and mental health
Mindfulness-based programs have been shown to significantly reduce stress in a variety of populations, ranging from caregivers of people living with dementia to children during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Meta-analyses published during the pandemic show that mindfulness programs are effective for reducing symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and depression – including the particularly vulnerable time during pregnancy and the postnatal period.
Mindfulness-based programs also show promise as a treatment option for anxiety disorders, which are the most common mental disorders, affecting an estimated 301 million people globally. While effective treatments for anxiety exist, many patients do not have access to them because they lack insurance coverage or transportation to providers, for instance, or they may experience only limited relief.
It’s important to note, however, that for those affected by mental or substance use disorders, mindfulness-based approaches should not replace first-line treatments like medicine and psychotherapy such as cognitive behavioral therapy. Mindfulness strategies should be seen as a supplement to these evidence-based treatments and a complement to healthy lifestyle interventions like physical activity and healthy eating.
How does meditation work? A look into the brain
Studies show that regular meditators experience better attention control and improved control of heart rate, breathing and autonomic nervous system functioning, which regulates involuntary responses in the body, such as blood pressure. Research also shows that people who meditate have lower levels of cortisol – a hormone involved in the stress response – than those who don’t.
A recent systematic review of neuroimaging studies showed that focused attention meditation is associated with functional changes in several brain regions involved in cognitive control and emotion-related processing. The review also found that more experienced meditators had stronger activation of the brain regions involved in those cognitive and emotional processes, suggesting that the brain benefits improve with more practice.
A regular meditation practice may also stave off age-related thinning of the cerebral cortex, which may help to protect against age-related disease and cognitive impairment.
Limitations of meditation research
This research does have limits. These include a lack of a consistent definition for the types of programs used, and a lack of rigorously controlled studies. In gold-standard randomized controlled trials with medications, study participants don’t know whether they are getting the active drug or a placebo.
In contrast, in trials of mindfulness-based interventions, participants know what condition they are assigned to and are not “blinded,” so they may expect that some of the health benefits may happen to them. This creates a sense of expectancy, which can be a confounding variable in studies. Many meditation studies also don’t frequently include a control group, which is needed to assess how it compares with other treatments.
Benefits and wider applications
Compared with medications, mindfulness-based programs may be more easily accessible and have fewer negative side effects. However, medication and psychotherapy – particularly cognitive behavioral therapy – work well for many, and a combination approach may be best. Mindfulness-based interventions are also cost-effective and have better health outcomes than usual care, particularly among high-risk patient populations – so there are economic benefits as well.
Researchers are studying ways to deliver mindfulness tools on a computer or smartphone app, or with virtual reality, which may be more effective than conventional in-person meditation training.
Importantly, mindfulness is not just for those with physical or mental health diagnoses. Anyone can use these strategies to reduce the risk of disease and to take advantage of the health benefits in everyday life, such as improved sleep and cognitive performance, elevated mood and lowered stress and anxiety.
Where to get started?
Many recreation centers, fitness studios and even universities offer in-person meditation classes. For those looking to see if meditation can help with the treatment of a physical or mental condition, there are over 600 clinical trialscurrently recruiting participants for various conditions, such as pain, cancer and depression.
If you want to try meditation from the comfort of your home, there are many free online videos on how to practice, including meditations for sleep, stress reduction, mindful eating and more. Several apps, such as Headspace, appear promising, with randomized controlled trials showing benefits for users.
The hardest part is, of course, getting started. However, if you set an alarm to practice every day, it will become a habit and may even translate into everyday life – which is the ultimate goal. For some, this may take some time and practice, and for others, this may start to happen pretty quickly. Even a single five-minute session can have positive health effects.
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This is a comprehensive article on a most important topic.
For whatever is happening in our world it is getting busier especially for those that are a great deal younger than me.
Picture Parade Four Hundred and Sixty-Nine
Yet more dog photographs from Unsplash.
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There you are, another set of adorable photographs of dogs, and that last photo showing how special is the bond between dog and human.
More in a week’s time!
A lost, and found, dog in Utah
A story that was widely reported.
I was short on time yesterday so no pre-amble.
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Search and rescue team save dog near frozen waterfall in Utah
The dog separated from its owner on Christmas Eve.
By Teddy Grant, December 27, 2022.
A dog that was stranded near a frozen waterfall in Utah on Christmas Eve was saved by search and rescue officials and reunited with her owner.
According to the Weber County Sheriff’s Office Search and Rescue, a local man was hiking near Waterfall Canyon on Saturday when he became separated from his dog Nala.
The unidentified hiker couldn’t find Nala by nightfall and resumed his search the morning of Christmas Day, the sheriff’s office wrote on its Facebook page.
The hiker’s family members contacted authorities around 1:00 p.m., local time, saying he wasn’t responding to their calls or text messages, officials said.
Nala’s owner answered one of the phone calls once he regained cellphone service and was able to let people know that Nala was around the waterfall, but couldn’t reach her because of the steepness and the icy condition of the terrain, according to Weber County Sheriff’s Office Search and Rescue.
A grab from video posted by Weber County Sheriff’s Office Search and Rescue shows the dog Nala at Waterfall Canyon in Ogden, Utah, Dec. 25, 2022.
Weber County Sheriff’s Office Search and Rescue
The search and rescue team responded to the call and were able to save a skittish Nala after a little coaxing, officials said.
“Nala was cold with a few minor injuries, but was able to hike down with the rescuers,” officials wrote. “She is one tough puppy! Once reaching the trailhead parking lot, both human and canine couldn’t have been happier to be reunited.”
According to Waterfall Canyon it is a “moderately challenging,” 2.4-mile trail near Ogden, Utah, according to AllTrails. Ogden is around 38 miles north of Salt Lake City.
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I’m sure you read that the human and the dog were very grateful to be reunited.
Learning from Dogs 