Earliest hunting scene cave painting; animal domestication syndrome

BBC Inside Science

BBC

Technology, Science

4.5 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 12 December 2019

⏱️ 29 minutes

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Summary

A cave painting in Sulawesi, Indonesia, has been dated and is at least 43,900 years old. The mural portrays a group of part-human, part-animal figures (called therianthropes), hunting large mammals with spears and ropes. It is thought to be the oldest representation of a hunting scene in human history, and perhaps Homo sapiens' oldest known figurative rock art. Adam Brumm at Griffith University in Brisbane is part of an international team that has been exploring this cave complex. He speculates with Adam Rutherford about who the artists were and what they were trying to depict. A famous Russian farm fox study has been running since the 1950’s. The researchers essentially took foxes bound for the fur trade and selected for tameness by choosing to keep and breed from the animals that showed less fear and more friendliness towards humans. After years of selection, the tamer foxes also showed physical changes (floppier ears, curlier tails, white spots, redder fur) as well as changes in breeding times. As a way to study the evolution of domestication of animals, this study is taught to students all over the world. However a chance discovery at a Fox Museum on a Canadian Island, shows the original foxes were taken from fur farms in Canada and had already been bred for tameness. Elinor Karlsson at the Broad Institute at MIT and Harvard University discusses with Adam whether we have to rethink the Animal Domestication Syndrome. Producer - Fiona Roberts

Transcript

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0:40.1	Hello You, this is the podcast of Inside Science from BBC Radio 4 first broadcast on the 12th of December
0:45.9	2019 I'm Madam Rutherford this week I won't lie we've got my favorite story of the year in fact two favorites
0:52.0	We've completely saved the best to last.
0:54.3	What does it mean to be human? There are no simple answers to that question but we are
0:59.3	a species of storyteller a creature that attempts to understand our world by recounting tales of our experiences of the things that matter to our lives.
1:08.0	Now science is part of that grand narrative and today we have two amazing tales from science. In a minute
1:14.9	we'll be retelling the legend of a famous Russian experiment that tamed wild foxes
1:19.9	over a few generations. Well all is not not what it seems, and those same foxes might have been
1:25.2	already rather tamed in Canada long before the experiment began. But first, that question of
1:31.6	what makes us human.
1:32.8	Evolutionary biologists are desperate to find out how and when we became the people that we are today.
1:38.8	Physically, we've been in our current form for more than a quarter of a million years. But only the last 40,000 years or so
1:45.3	do we see the emergence of behaviors associated with modern humans, that is us, things like
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