Fascinating research coming out of Duke University
This Post was stimulated by a link sent to me by Chris Snuggs, who will be joining the author’s team at Learning from Dogs in due course.
The link was to an article published in Time Magazine on September 21st and is available in their online version.
The article is about the extraordinary social skills that have been developed by dogs over the millennia that they have been associated with man. It featured Brain Hare (sort of seems an appropriate name!) Assistant Professor, Evolutionary Anthropology at Duke.
The article is also rather timely as only a few days ago, there was a Post on this Blog about the befriending of a man with a wild wolf, or was it the other way around!
Back to the Time magazine article,
“Understanding a pointed finger may seem easy, but consider this: while humans and canines can do it naturally, no other known species in the animal kingdom can. Consider too all the mental work that goes into figuring out what a pointed finger means: paying close attention to a person, recognizing that a gesture reflects a thought, that another animal can even have a thought.”
Learning from Dogs 