A Pet Theory of Civilization

Anthropology | In The Boston Globe, Drake Bennett reports on the work of Pat Shipman, a Penn State anthropologist. She theorizes that Homo sapiens survived by knowing well the beasts they depended upon for food, and that this was key to the rise of civilization, including pet domestication.

Animals make us human. She means this not in a metaphorical way — that animals teach us about loyalty or nurturing or the fragility of life or anything like that — but that the unique ability to observe and control the behavior of other animals is what allowed one particular set of Pleistocene era primates to evolve into modern man.

The hunting of animals and the processing of their corpses drove the creation of tools, and the need to record and relate information about animals was so important that it gave rise to the creation of language and art. Our bond with nonhuman animals has shaped us at the level of our genes, giving us the ability to drink milk into adulthood and even, Shipman argues, promoting the set of finely honed relational antennae that allowed us to create the complex societies most of us live in today. Our love of pets is an artifact of that evolutionary interdependence.

Some of the professor’s colleagues see her ideas as a promising new framework for looking at human evolution, Mr. Bennett writes, “one that highlights the extent to which the human story has been a collection of interspecies collaborations.” They are set forth in the journal Current Anthropology and a book due out next year.