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Letter: Path to pet dogs may have worked for other species

Published 3 September 2025

From David Fishel, Indianapolis, Indiana, US

The idea that our ancient ancestors raised wolf pups as pets and then harvested them makes perfect sense, an idea proposed as a route to eventual domestication(9 August, p 34).

Could our ancestors have also raised juvenile ungulates for the products they would yield as adults? I can easily picture a band of hunters discovering a baby deer near its slain mother and subsequently taking it in. I know from experience that white-tailed fawns easily bond with human caretakers. So it isn’t a stretch to imagine similarly tamed deer following a band of palaeolithic hunters.

Issue no. 3559 published 6 September 2025

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