Yawn

Today's interesting fact has to do with yawning.

Yawning is contagious in humans and other primates.

If any primate sees another yawn, the odds are it will also yawn.

But with humans, the contagiousness of yawning greater.

Not only can we humans yawn when we see other humans, dogs, cats, or primates yawn, we also can start yawning if we read about it, write about it or even just think about yawning.

As no other animals has successfully learnt to read, humans are unique.

Today’s interesting fact has to do with the Dogs and their sense of smell.

A dog's primary method of viewing the world is its sense of smell.

Dogs have 300 million olfactory receptors whereas a human only has 6 million.

A dog’s olfactory cortex uses about 12.5% of a dog’s brain, whereas that of a human is less than one percent.

Dogs can tell if a how long a scent has been on the ground and can easily work out which way a scent trail goes.

In effect scents give dogs a sense of time.

When I was young, I read Tarzan novels.

Tarzan, because he was raised by an unidentified species of great ape (can't be gorillas because they had a language) he was supposed to be able to use and process scents as well as a dog could.

But to do that, he would have had to have a massive restructuring of his brain and nose.

Today’s interesting fact has to do with dogs.

I wrote earlier about the new evidence that humans and dogs have co-existed for more than 32,000 years.

An article I read a little while ago asked why humans would have domesticated dogs, because as carnivores they would compete with humans, and that that competition would contraindicate the relationship.

However, another article suggested that as dogs are eaten over a large part of the world, and that dogs have been shown to been eaten everywhere in the world at one time or another, domesticating dogs would have made sense, especially if larger litters were selected for as well as breeding more than once a year.

A bitch that is nursing doesn't eat much more than they do when they are not, they tend to move about less and use less energy than they would normally.

As the owners of the litter would only want to keep one or two from a litter at most, and that they would be concentrating on selecting those in the litter that got on with humans best, the rest of the litter would be available for the common pot.

This would explain why dogs breed more than once in a year, unlike wolves, as well as the larger than normal wolf litter sizes most dogs have.

Today's interesting fact has to do with dog's wool.

Which would you think is warmer, cardigans created from wool from sheep or lambs, or wool from dogs.

The answer might not be what you think.

Dog's wool is better at keeping you warm, it is up to 80% warmer than sheep or lambs wool.

You might not be able to purchase Chiengora garments, but there are plenty of examples on the internet on how to create your own garments.

Dog wool was the main fiber spun on the North American continent before the Spaniards introduced sheep.

Today's interesting fact has to do with Dogs.

As most people know, the domestic dog seems to be a descendant of a species of wolves that lives on and around the Himalayas, with the occasional input of genes from other wolves or wild dogs throughout the world.

Short legged dogs seem to all descend from one genetic change, that is felt to have originated in the middle east, anywhere from 10,000 to 30,000 years ago.