Tuesday, July 07, 2020

Dogs can detect burials up to 5K years old

I have written several times that dogs seem to like to sit on top of stone mounds. There is lots of photo evidence. They don't seek out boulders to stand on - so the preference is not about getting a view out over the landscape.

So I always wondered if dogs smelled something (you know...like human remains) and how long after burial would something still have a detectable smell for a dog. Well, apparently the burial age can be up to 5 thousand years - more than enough to encompass the large stone mounds of our last 2 thousand years

Anyway:
(from the Atlantic)
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/07/dogs-archaeology-bones/613828/

(past references to dogs on rock piles)
https://rockpiles.blogspot.com/search?q=dogs

2 comments :

Tim MacSweeney said...

I was just thinking about this a couple days ago!

pwax said...

Seems like a way to determine a burial, without excavation or chemical analyses.