Jo

“The influence of the recent past is always overestimated. When we are asked to name the greatest human inventions we tend to think of the telephone, the electric light bulb and the silicon chip rather than the wheel, the plough and the taming of fire.”
― Frans De Waal, Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex among Apes

“Martin Street is the archaeologist who has done most work in recent years on the dog from Bonn-Oberkassel. His theory is that what is known as ‘putting the game at bay’ was one of the first important tasks performed by dogs. This is a method of hunting still used today in many places, including the forests of Sweden. The dog runs around in the woods on its own to track game, while the hunter tries to stay near it. Once the dog locates its quarry, it starts to bark, forcing the animal to stop moving and focus on the dog’s irritating barking. The dog has put its quarry at bay. In the meantime, the hunter creeps nearer and shoots the animal. This type of hunting emerged when woods started to grow on the tundra, blocking the view. Before that time it was easier for hunters to scan the landscape for their prey from an elevated point. This is what makes it so interesting that the first dog universally recognised as such, the one from Bonn-Oberkassel, lived 14,500 years ago, at precisely the time when the tundra of the Ice Age was beginning to give way to woodland. That circumstance, in my view, is rather too striking to be a mere coincidence. If”
― Karin Bojs, My European Family: The First 54,000 Years

“Touch’ is a multi-faceted concept, reflecting the different types of receptors. The simplest are free nerve endings which detect pain and changes in temperature; slightly more complex are Merkel’s tactile cells (which detect pressure); followed by Grandry bodies, which consist of two to four tactile cells and detect movement (velocity); and the lamellated Herbst corpuscles (similar to Vater-Pacinian corpuscles in mammals), which are sensitive to acceleration.”
― Tim Birkhead, Bird Sense: What It's Like to Be a Bird

“Harold Laswell's famous definition of politics as a social process determining "who gets what, when, and how," there can be little doubt that chimpanzees engage in it. Since in both humans and their closest relatives the process involves bluff, coalitions, and isolation tactics, a common terminology is warranted.”
― Frans de Waal, Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex among Apes