Hi there, it's Matt here and welcome back to the podcast.

Today we are talking about a special topic, pets in honor of National Pet Day over the weekend.

I want you to imagine something. Picture a woman that's called her Mara. She lived roughly 12,000 years ago, somewhere on the edge of what we now call the Near East.

The nights where she lives are cold and dark and long. She has fire, she has shelter, she has her small community, and she has something else, something that arrived at the edges of her camp a few generations back

drawn by food scraps and proximity. Dogs or nearly dogs. Protodogs, really, the descendants of wolves

who at some point made a calculated gamble that the human camp was a better bet than the wilderness.

On a cold night, Mara doesn't agonize over whether it's appropriate to let the animals sleep near her.

She doesn't wonder if this is good sleep hygiene. She doesn't Google it.

She does what the situation calls for. They share warmth. She

sleeps. The dog sleeps. One shelter. Now here's what I find remarkable about that image.

It is not a metaphor. It is not a sentimental reconstruction. It is, as far as we can tell from the

genetic archaeological and anthropological

record, what actually happened. Genetic evidence places the domestication of dogs at least 15,000

years ago, possibly longer, and ethnographic accounts from multiple continents document that humans and their dogs

have been sharing sleeping spaces ever since. Indigenous Australians, for instance, were documented

sleeping alongside dogs on cold nights, specifically for warmth, a practice so embedded in everyday life that it gave rise to an expression

we still use today, a three dog night, meaning it's cold enough that you need three dogs

pressed against you just to make it to morning. And then something changed. Not the dogs,

not the humans, not the biology. What changed was the culture.

Somewhere in the centuries of industrialization and urbanization and the rise of what historians call

the civilizing process, sleep became private. Beds became personal. The idea that an animal sharing your sleeping space was

somehow unhygienic, inappropriate, even morally suspect. This idea, arrived with the authority

...