The Frozen Puppy

Lex Anteinternet: The Eastern Shoshone consider cannabis: In one of the many posts that I start and never finish, I had in my draft posts a item that was from the Irish Times on Irish physicians lam...

The overall problem, however, is that distinguishing between hemp and marijuana isn't really completely possible overall, as the difference between the two is somewhat like the difference between wolves and wolfy dogs.  Is that a dog, or a wolf?  It's hard to tell

Which leads me to a science item, having nothing to do with hemp or marijuana, but oddly illustrating the point in a way.

Scientists, last year, but only revealed within the last week or so, discovered an 18,000 year old puppy in a lump of frozen mud in Siberia.  It's very well preserved.  It's a male.

They've sequenced its genes and can't tell if its a wolf, or a dog.

That's not really that surprising, and this conundrum has happened before with really old canine remains. Early dogs were nearly wolves.  The first canines that hung out in human camps were wolves.  Shoot, for all we know the very first canine to be incorporated into a human society as a pet may have been a wolf puppy.

Now, that doesn't argue, as some folks will do, that humans should keep wolves as pets.  Wolves are a wild animal and even if acclimated to humans it doesn't make them a pet.  They're still wolves.  But the distance between the first dog and wolves isn't a very far distance.  At some point, that distance must have been nearly non existent.