Photo credit: Hee-Chung Lee
Dogs are our soulmates.
Humans give meaning to the dead by burying them. Humans first started to bury their own dead probably around the time of the Neanderthals, and certainly by the time of the European Upper Paleolithic. After humans started to bury their own dead, they then started to bury their dead dogs with their own dead. The oldest dog burial, from Bonn-Oberkassel in Germany, is more than 14,000 years old. It is a burial of two dogs and two humans. A recent study argues that one of the dogs was mortally ill, but that others took care of it so that it could outlive its allotted life — for as long as a whole month. And when it died, it was buried alongside an old human male and a younger human female. This may be the oldest evidence that humans kept dogs for company...