Went to see Jumanji, got intrigued by Alpha

[StrandedonEarth]

I finally went to see Jumanji last night, and it was great! Karen Gillan was kickS, Jack Black nailed it, Kevin Hart was hilarious, and Dwayne Johnson simply, uh, smouldered.

But what really caught my attention was the trailer for the prehistoric flick  Alpha. It basically sounds like

Spoiler

the very first "boy and his dog" story

Seems like it's been in the can for awhile, not sure what the holdup is. Release is in September 2018. I think Hollywood is overdue for a prehistoric epic like the old Quest for Fire. Hopefully it'll be as good as I think it could be.

 

[PakledHostage]

I bought Quest For Fire on Google Play but haven't gotten around to watching it again. Soon. I'll keep an eye out for this new movie, too.

[PakledHostage]

I just got around to watching the trailer... They seem to have the approximate era of domestication about right, but I doubt domestication of dogs started with a one-off event. In Quest For Fire, they show dogs hanging around the human encampment, probably scavenging the leftovers. I've always imagined that dogs were domesticated that way: as a side effect of their hanging around us. They certainly have an instinctive propensity for mooching...

And on a somewhat related note, there was an episode of Quirks and Quarks (a weekly science magazine program on CBC Radio) about two years ago where the researchers that they interviewed presented a hypothesis that modern humans may have actually wiped out our hominid competitors by out competing them for food after our ancestors domesticated dogs. While the researchers admitted that it would be very difficult to prove, they speculated that our eyes may even have had something to do with it. We are the only great apes that have visible eye whites; other hominids may not have had visible eye whites like we do. Our visible eye whites present an advantage in hunting because they allow dogs and other human hunters to see what their human partners are looking at without making any noise. The combination of human hunters working together with domesticated dogs who were adept at reading human faces (as modern domesticated dogs are) may have been formidable enough that all the other hominids starved off into extinction. It sounds plausible anyway...

Edited February 22, 2018 by PakledHostage

[StrandedonEarth]

Domestication of wolves/dogs probably started independently in a few places (my conjecture). It may well be that it started with friending a injured animal, and once it was proven it could be done, they started trying to friend the camp followers ( probably not tried before as they wouldn’t want to encourage vicious animals to hang around). Another likely method would be finding a litter of pups after having to kill the dam, or wiping out the pack. That may have been how they were first domesticated, and most likely the main method of friending more animals once they got the hang of it and wanted to friend more. 

I prefer to use ‘friend’ instead of ‘tame’ because IMO, historically, animals are tamed by force and fear, and will turn on you if given a chance. A friended animal, again IMO, is much less likely to turn on its human

Edited February 22, 2018 by StrandedonEarth