China's State Council, the country's cabinet, issued an action plan on Thursday for the continuous improvement of air quality. Under the plan, China should boost the development of new energy and clean energy, while strictly and reasonably controlling coal consumption and prohibiting new steel capacity.

By 2025, it is expected that electricity should account for around 30 percent of total energy end-use consumption, and non-fossil energy consumption should reach around 20 percent, according to the action plan. It was released following the conclusion of the 28th UN Climate Change Conference (COP28) in Dubai last week, during which China's role in global climate governance was highlighted.

The country will also carry out caps on coal consumption while ensuring energy supply security, according to the plan.

It is expected that by 2025, coal consumption in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region and neighboring areas as well as the Yangtze River Delta should drop by 10 percent and 5 percent compared with that of 2020, respectively. And the coal consumption in Fenwei Plain regions in Central China should report negative growth.

In addition to a ban on building new steel factories, Chinese authorities will also resolutely curb the blind launch of high-energy-consuming, high-emission, and low-level projects under the plan.

By 2025, the plan also aims to reduce PM 2.5 concentrations in Chinese cities at and above the prefectural level by 10 percent from 2020, and the annual ratio of days with heavy pollution and above should be within 1 percent. Emissions of nitric oxide and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) should also be reduced by 10 percent from 2020.

The plan marks another effort by China to fulfill its promise of carbon peaking and neutrality. China has committed to a "dual carbon" goal of reaching the peak of carbon emissions by 2030 and attaining carbon neutrality by 2060.

China's actions to address climate change have not only promoted the country's green and low-carbon development, but also made important contributions to addressing global climate change, analysts said.

Lately some customers in Beijing were "shocked" to hear that Daoxiangcun, a store that sells everyday snacks, would no longer be listed as a laozihao, or time-honored brand. Fortunately, it turned out that it was a same-named store in Tianjin, rather than the renowned store in Beijing, that would lose the honor. 

Together with the Tianjin Daoxiangcun, 54 other Chinese time-honored brand stores would be removed from the list of Chinese old and famous brands, including Xinluchun restaurant in Beijing, Laobanzhai restaurant in Shanghai, and Guanshengyuan store in Chongqing due to long-term poor operation, bankruptcy or loss of trademarks, according to a recent notice issued by China's Ministry of Commerce (MOC). 

China's time-honored brands refer to quality products, excellent techniques or reliable services that have been passed down through generations. With distinctive regional characteristics, most of them have been widely recognized in all sectors over 100 years. In 1991, more than 1,600 businesses were conferred with this title, and in 2006 and 2011, another 1,128 enterprises were added.

According to the MOC, this move aims to improve the protection and inheritance of time-honored brands and build a long-term mechanism for their innovation development, setting well-operated ones as standards and examples for other time-honored brands.

However, some of the brands have lost their advantages due to the changing times, while their standards have fallen. 

Tianjin Daoxiangcun, established in 1988, has a reputation for selling high-priced but poor-tasting pastries. Xinluchun restaurant in Beijing used to be well-known in the 1980s for serving savory steamed buns, which some Beijingers still miss. However, after it shifted to regular dishes, its business deteriorated. 

Like customers in Beijing, Shanghai residents were also dumbfounded by the removal of the popular and familiar restaurant Laobanzhai. While some expressed regret about the change, others consented saying, "Laobanzhai's environment, services and dishes no longer deserve its status." Some moaned that "short-sighted operators have ruined the business of their ancestors."

Established in 1905, Laobanzhai restaurant serves pastry and Huaiyang cuisine, known for its light and fresh flavor and intricate cooking techniques. It was listed as a time-honored brand in 2006. 

To respond to the quality of their services, the manager admitted that a few senior staffers have retired, which "may have caused some problems. But we are trying to improve our services, and at least the quality of the food we serve is guaranteed, and the variety is still popular." 

 "Now we are striving to reexamine ourselves," the manager said.

While sifting out the unqualified, quite a number of qualified businesses have remained on the list, among which the Daoxiangcun store in Beijing is a good example. 

First established in 1895, Beijing Daoxiangcun was the first store to sell dishes from southern China, including pastry, meat and special food for traditional Chinese festivals such as moon cakes as well as frozen food. In 1993, it was listed as a time-honored brand, and in 2004, it won the title of "famous Chinese brand" due to the good quality and reputation of its food and products. 

To protect time-honored brands, the list has been increasing instead of decreasing. In August, there were 238 old and famous brands from Beijing on the list with an average age of 140 years, an increase of 15 enterprises , including a traditional Chinese medicine company. Including the Capital Automobile Group, Beijing Tongren Optometry Store and Beijing Ruizhenhou Restaurant, they are part of the eighth batch of businesses on the list and cover more diverse sectors. 

Time-honored brands do not just represent the best of the business world, they also have profound cultural significance. 

Before a brand was set up, choosing the right name was a major priority as an auspicious name carries the great expectations of the owner of the business.  

Normally, owners selected names from famous verses in ancient Chinese literary works such as Dream of Red Mansion to pray for a thriving business, or to show their political aspirations such as jianhua, meaning "building the Chinese nation." 

Some entrepreneurs in southern China named their stores with a distinctive local style. A catering business in Suzhou, East China's Jiangsu Province, located in a typical waterside building was named Caizhizhai, or "Collecting Water Lilies." It also serves various, exquisitely made pastries that have been well-received all over the country.

Besides cultural connections, these businesses also uphold customer-centered principles. For instance, each season, Beijing Daoxiangcun will promote different foods to customers and remind them of Chinese traditions. 

These time-honored brands represent the best of traditional Chinese culture. Those who have remained on the list demonstrate their success in maintaining the businesses of their ancestors, the continuity of their products and services, and the inheritance of traditional Chinese culture. Those who have vanished must learn to catch up and adapt to the changing times. In this way, they can not only preserve their brands, but also do their bit for the protection of the traditional Chinese culture. 

Eggs, long condemned for making raw cookie dough a forbidden pleasure, can stop taking all the blame. There’s another reason to resist the sweet uncooked temptation: flour.

The seemingly innocuous pantry staple can harbor strains of E. coli bacteria that make people sick. And, while not a particularly common source of foodborne illness, flour has been implicated in two E. coli outbreaks in the United States and Canada in the last two years.

Pinning down tainted flour as the source of the U.S. outbreak, which sickened 63 people between December 2015 and September 2016, was trickier than the average food poisoning investigation, researchers recount November 22 in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Usually, state health departments rely on standard questionnaires to find a common culprit for a cluster of reported illnesses, says Samuel Crowe, an epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, who led the study. But flour isn’t usually tracked on these surveys. So when the initial investigation yielded inconclusive results, public health researchers turned to in-depth personal interviews with 10 people who had fallen ill.

Crowe spent up to two hours asking each person detailed questions about what he or she had eaten around the time of getting sick. Asking people what they ate eight weeks ago can be challenging, Crowe says: Many people can’t even remember what they ate for breakfast that morning.

“I got a little lucky,” Crowe says. Two people remembered eating raw cookie dough before getting sick. They each sent Crowe pictures of the bag of flour they had used to make the batter. It turned out that both bags had been produced in the same plant. That was a “pretty unusual thing,” he says.
Follow-up questioning helped Crowe and his team pin down flour as the likely source. Eventually, U.S. Food and Drug Administration scientists analyzed the flour and isolated strains of E. coli bacteria that produce Shiga toxins, which make E. coli dangerous.

Disease-causing bacteria, including E. coli, usually thrive in moist environments, like bags of prewashed lettuce (SN: 12/24/16, p. 4). But the bacteria can also survive in a desiccated state for months and be re-activated with water, says Crowe. So as soon as dry flour mingles with eggs or oil, dormant bacteria can reawaken and start to replicate.

Cookie dough wasn’t the culprit in every case. A few children who got sick had been given raw tortilla dough to play with while waiting for a table at a restaurant. The cases all involved wheat flour from the same facility, leading to a recall of more than 250 flour-containing products.

There are ways to kill bacteria in flour before it reaches grocery store shelves, but they aren’t in use in the United States. Heat treatment, for example, will rid flour of E. coli and other pathogens. But the process also changes the structure of the flour, which affects the texture of baked goods, says Rick Holley, a food safety expert at the University of Manitoba in Canada who wasn’t part of the study. Irradiation, used to kill parasites and other pests in flour, might be a better option, Holley says. But it takes a higher dose of radiation to zap bacteria than it does to kill pests.

Or, of course, people could hold out for warm, freshly baked cookies.

Ask a classroom of children to draw a scientist, and you’ll see plenty of Crayola-colored lab coats, goggles and bubbling beakers. That image hasn’t changed much since the 1960s. But the person wearing the lab coat is shifting.

A new analysis finds that more female scientists have appeared in kids’ drawings in recent decades — going from nearly nonexistent in the 1960s to about a third in 2016.

“A lot has changed since the 1960s,” says David Miller, a Ph.D. candidate in psychology at Northwestern University who reports the findings with colleagues March 20 in Child Development.
The first of many “draw-a-scientist” studies asked nearly 5,000 children to draw a scientist between 1966 and 1977. “Of those 5,000 drawings,” Miller says, “only 28 … depicted a female scientist.” That’s just 0.6 percent.

Today, “more women are becoming scientists, and there’s some evidence that female scientists are being represented more in the media,” he says. For instance, in a content analysis of the magazine Highlights for Children, 13 percent of people pictured in science feature stories of the 1960s were women or girls, compared with 44 percent in the 2000s.
To look for changes in children’s perceptions over time, the researchers conducted a meta-analysis, combining data from 78 studies that included a total of more than 20,000 U.S. children in kindergarten through 12th grade.

On average, 28 percent of children drew female scientists in studies conducted from 1985 to 2016, the researchers found.

What hasn’t changed much: Kids pick up stereotypes by gender as they grow up. At age 6, girls in the more recent studies drew female scientists about 70 percent of the time. By age 16, 75 percent drew male scientists.

“This is a critical period in which kids are learning stereotypes,” Miller says. “It’s important that teachers and parents present diverse examples of both male and female scientists.”

Editors’ note: This story was corrected on March 21, 2018, to note that by age 16, girls drew only 25 percent of scientists as female.

The glossy leaves and branching roots of mangroves are downright eye-catching, and now a study finds that the moon plays a special role in the vigor of these trees.

Long-term tidal cycles set in motion by the moon drive, in large part, the expansion and contraction of mangrove forests in Australia, researchers report in the Sept. 16 Science Advances. This discovery is key to predicting when stands of mangroves, which are good at sequestering carbon and could help fight climate change, are most likely to proliferate (SN: 11/18/21). Such knowledge could inform efforts to protect and restore the forests.
Mangroves are coastal trees that provide habitat for fish and buffer against erosion (SN: 9/14/22). But in some places, the forests face a range of threats, including coastal development, pollution and land clearing for agriculture. To get a bird’s-eye view of these forests, Neil Saintilan, an environmental scientist at Macquarie University in Sydney, and his colleagues turned to satellite imagery. Using NASA and U.S. Geological Survey Landsat data from 1987 to 2020, the researchers calculated how the size and density of mangrove forests across Australia changed over time.

After accounting for persistent increases in these trees’ growth — probably due to rising carbon dioxide levels, higher sea levels and increasing air temperatures — Saintilan and his colleagues noticed a curious pattern. Mangrove forests tended to expand and contract in both extent and canopy cover in a predictable manner. “I saw this 18-year oscillation,” Saintilan says.

That regularity got the researchers thinking about the moon. Earth’s nearest celestial neighbor has long been known to help drive the tides, which deliver water and necessary nutrients to mangroves. A rhythm called the lunar nodal cycle could explain the mangroves’ growth pattern, the team hypothesized.

Over the course of 18.6 years, the plane of the moon’s orbit around Earth slowly tips. When the moon’s orbit is the least tilted relative to our planet’s equator, semidiurnal tides — which consist of two high and two low tides each day — tend to have a larger range. That means that in areas that experience semidiurnal tides, higher high tides and lower low tides are generally more likely. The effect is caused by the angle at which the moon tugs gravitationally on the Earth.

Saintilan and his colleagues found that mangrove forests experiencing semidiurnal tides tended to be larger and denser precisely when higher high tides were expected based on the moon’s orbit. The effect even seemed to outweigh other climatic drivers of mangrove growth, such as El Niño conditions. Other regions with mangroves, such as Vietnam and Indonesia, probably experience the same long-term trends, the team suggests.

Having access to data stretching back decades was key to this discovery, Saintilan says. “We’ve never really picked up before some of these longer-term drivers of vegetation dynamics.”

It’s important to recognize this effect on mangrove populations, says Octavio Aburto-Oropeza, a marine ecologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif., who was not involved in the research.

Scientists now know when some mangroves are particularly likely to flourish and should make an extra effort at those times to promote the growth of these carbon-sequestering trees, Aburto-Oropeza says. That might look like added limitations on human activity nearby that could harm the forests, he says. “We should be more proactive.”

Cocooned within the bowels of the Earth, one mineral’s metamorphosis into another may trigger some of the deepest earthquakes ever detected.

These cryptic tremors — known as deep-focus earthquakes — are a seismic conundrum. They violently rupture at depths greater than 300 kilometers, where intense temperatures and pressures are thought to force rocks to flow smoothly. Now, experiments suggest that those same hellish conditions might also sometimes transform olivine — the primary mineral in Earth’s mantle — into the mineral wadsleyite. This mineral switch-up can destabilize the surrounding rock, enabling earthquakes at otherwise impossible depths, mineral physicist Tomohiro Ohuchi and colleagues report September 15 in Nature Communications.
“It’s been a real puzzle for many scientists because earthquakes shouldn’t occur deeper than 300 kilometers,” says Ohuchi, of Ehime University in Matsuyama, Japan.

Deep-focus earthquakes usually occur at subduction zones where tectonic plates made of oceanic crust — rich in olivine — plunge toward the mantle (SN: 1/13/21). Since the quakes’ seismic waves lose strength during their long ascent to the surface, they aren’t typically dangerous. But that doesn’t mean the quakes aren’t sometimes powerful. In 2013, a magnitude 8.3 deep-focus quake struck around 609 kilometers below the Sea of Okhotsk, just off Russia’s eastern coast.

Past studies hinted that unstable olivine crystals could spawn deep quakes. But those studies tested other minerals that were similar in composition to olivine but deform at lower pressures, Ohuchi says, or the experiments didn’t strain samples enough to form faults.

He and his team decided to put olivine itself to the test. To replicate conditions deep underground, the researchers heated and squeezed olivine crystals up to nearly 1100° Celsius and 17 gigapascals. Then the team used a mechanical press to further compress the olivine slowly and monitored the deformation.

From 11 to 17 gigapascals and about 800° to 900° C, the olivine recrystallized into thin layers containing new wadsleyite and smaller olivine grains. The researchers also found tiny faults and recorded bursts of sound waves — indicative of miniature earthquakes. Along subducting tectonic plates, many of these thin layers grow and link to form weak regions in the rock, upon which faults and earthquakes can initiate, the researchers suggest.

“The transformation really wreaks havoc with the [rock’s] mechanical stability,” says geophysicist Pamela Burnley of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who was not involved in the research. The findings help confirm that olivine transformations are enabling deep-focus earthquakes, she says.

Next, Ohuchi’s team plans to experiment on olivine at even higher pressures to gain insights into the mineral’s deformation at greater depths.

The key to landing your dream job could be connecting with and then sending a single message to a casual acquaintance on social media.

That’s the conclusion of a five-year study of over 20 million users on the professional networking site LinkedIn, researchers report in the Sept. 16 Science. The study is the first large-scale effort to experimentally test a nearly 50-year-old social science theory that says weak social ties matter more than strong ones for getting ahead in life, including finding a good job.
“The weak tie theory is one of the most celebrated and cited findings in social science,” says network scientist Dashun Wang of Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., who coauthored a perspective piece in the same issue of Science. This study “provides the first causal evidence for this idea of weak ties explaining job mobility.”

Sociologist Mark Granovetter of Stanford University proposed the weak tie theory in 1973. The theory, which has garnered nearly 67,000 scientific citations, hinges on the idea that humans cluster into social spheres that connect via bridges (SN: 8/13/03). Those bridges represent weak social ties between people, and give individuals who cross access to realms of new ideas and information, including about job markets.

But the influential theory has come under fire in recent years. In particular, a 2017 analysis in the Journal of Labor Economics of 6 million Facebook users showed that increasing interaction with a friend online, thereby strengthening that social tie, increased the likelihood of working with that friend.

In the new study, LinkedIn gave Sinan Aral, a managerial economist at MIT, and his team access to data from the company’s People You May Know algorithm, which recommends new connections to users. Over five years, the social media site’s operators used seven variations of the algorithm for users actively seeking connections, each recommending varying levels of weak and strong ties to users. During that time, 2 billion new ties and 600,000 job changes were noted on the site.

Aral and his colleagues measured tie strength via the number of mutual LinkedIn connections and direct messages between users. Job transitions occurred when two criteria were met: A pair connected on LinkedIn at least one year prior to the job seeker joining the same company as the other user; and the user who first joined the company was there for at least a year before the second user came onboard. Those criteria were meant in part to weed out situations where the two could have ended up at the same company by chance.
Overall, weak ties were more likely to lead to job changes than strong ones, the team found. But the study adds a twist to the theory: When job hunting, mid-tier friends are more helpful than either one’s closest friends or near strangers. Those are the friends with whom you share roughly 10 connections and seldom interact, Aral says. “They’re still weak ties, but they are not the weakest ties.”

The researchers also found that when a user added more weak ties to their network, that person applied to more jobs overall, which converted to getting more jobs. But that finding applied only to highly digitized jobs, such as those heavily reliant on software and amenable to remote work. Strong ties were more beneficial than weak ties for some job seekers outside the digital realm. Aral suspects those sorts of jobs may be more local and thus reliant on members of tight-knit communities.

The finding that job seekers should lean on mid-level acquaintances corroborates smaller studies, says network scientist Cameron Piercy of the University of Kansas in Lawrence who wasn’t involved in either the 2017 study or this more recent one.

That evidence suggests that the weakest acquaintances lack enough information about the job candidate, while the closest friends know too much about the candidate’s strengths — and flaws. “There’s this medium-ties sweet spot where you are willing to vouch for them because they know a couple people that you know,” Piercy says.

But he and others also raise ethical concerns about the new study. Piercy worries about research that manipulates people’s social media spaces without clearly and obviously indicating that it’s being done. In the new study, LinkedIn users who visited the “My Network” page for connection recommendations — who make up less than 5 percent of the site’s monthly active users — got automatically triggered into the experiment.

And it’s unclear how LinkedIn, whose researchers are coauthors of the study, will use this information moving forward. “When you are talking about people’s work, their ability to make money, this is important,” Piercy says. The company “should recommend weak ties, the version of the algorithm that led to more job attainment, if its purpose is to connect people with work. But they don’t make that conclusion in the paper.”

Another limitation is that the analyzed data lacked vital demographic information on users. That was for privacy reasons, the researchers say. But breaking down the results by gender is crucial as some evidence suggests that women — but not men — must rely on both weak and strong ties for professional advancement, Northwestern’s Wang says.

Still, with over half of jobs generally found through social ties, the findings could point people toward better ways to hunt for a job in today’s tumultuous environment. “You may have seen these recommendations on LinkedIn and you may have ignored them. You think ‘Oh, I don’t really know that person,’” Aral says. “But you may be doing yourself a disservice.”

A single, doomed moon could clear up a couple of mysteries about Saturn.

This hypothetical missing moon, dubbed Chrysalis, could have helped tilt Saturn over, researchers suggest September 15 in Science. The ensuing orbital chaos might then have led to the moon’s demise, shredding it to form the iconic rings that encircle the planet today.

“We like it because it’s a scenario that explains two or three different things that were previously not thought to be related,” says study coauthor Jack Wisdom, a planetary scientist at MIT. “The rings are related to the tilt, who would ever have guessed that?”
Saturn’s rings appear surprisingly young, a mere 150 million years or so old (SN: 12/14/17). If the dinosaurs had telescopes, they might have seen a ringless Saturn. Another mysterious feature of the gas giant is its nearly 27-degree tilt relative to its orbit around the sun. That tilt is too large to have formed when Saturn did or to be the result of collisions knocking the planet over.
Planetary scientists have long suspected that the tilt is related to Neptune, because of a coincidence in timing between the way the two planets move. Saturn’s axis wobbles, or precesses, like a spinning top. Neptune’s entire orbit around the sun also wobbles, like a struggling hula hoop.

The periods of both precessions are almost the same, a phenomenon known as resonance. Scientists theorized that gravity from Saturn’s moons — especially the largest moon, Titan — helped the planetary precessions line up. But some features of Saturn’s internal structure were not known well enough to prove that the two timings were related.

Wisdom and colleagues used precision measurements of Saturn’s gravitational field from the Cassini spacecraft, which plunged into Saturn in 2017 after 13 years orbiting the gas giant, to figure out the details of its internal structure (SN: 9/15/17). Specifically, the team worked out Saturn’s moment of inertia, a measure of how much force is needed to tip the planet over. The team found that the moment of inertia is close to, but not exactly, what it would be if Saturn’s spin were in perfect resonance with Neptune’s orbit.

“We argue that it’s so close, it couldn’t have occurred by chance,” Wisdom says. “That’s where this satellite Chrysalis came in.”

After considering a volley of other explanations, Wisdom and colleagues realized that another smallish moon would have helped Titan bring Saturn and Neptune into resonance by adding its own gravitational tugs. Titan drifted away from Saturn until its orbit synced up with that of Chrysalis. The enhanced gravitational kicks from the larger moon sent the doomed smaller moon on a chaotic dance. Eventually, Chrysalis swooped so close to Saturn that it grazed the giant planet’s cloud tops. Saturn ripped the moon apart, and slowly ground its pieces down into the rings.

Calculations and computer simulations showed that the scenario works, though not all the time. Out of 390 simulated scenarios, only 17 ended with Chrysalis disintegrating to create the rings. Then again, massive, striking rings like Saturn’s are rare, too.

The name Chrysalis came from that spectacular ending: “A chrysalis is a cocoon of a butterfly,” Wisdom says. “The satellite Chrysalis was dormant for 4.5 billion years, presumably. Then suddenly the rings of Saturn emerged from it.”

The story hangs together, says planetary scientist Larry Esposito of the University of Colorado Boulder, who was not involved in the new work. But he’s not entirely convinced. “I think it’s all plausible, but maybe not so likely,” he says. “If Sherlock Holmes is solving a case, even the improbable explanation may be the right one. But I don’t think we’re there yet.”

A child who lived on the Indonesian island of Borneo around 31,000 years ago underwent the oldest known surgical operation, an amputation of the lower left leg, researchers say.

One or more hunter-gatherers who performed the operation possessed detailed knowledge of human anatomy and considerable technical skill, enabling the youngster to avoid fatal blood loss and infection, say archaeologist Tim Maloney of Griffith University in Southport, Australia, and colleagues.

Healed bone where the lower leg was amputated indicates that the ancient youth survived for at least six to nine years after surgery before dying at age 19 or 20, the investigators report September 7 in Nature. Since there is no evidence of crushing from an accident or an animal’s bite at the amputation site, the researchers suspect that an unidentified medical problem led to the operation.
Maloney’s team excavated this individual’s remains in 2020 from a grave inside a large, three-chambered cave. Radiocarbon dating of burned bits of wood just below the grave along with another dating technique on a tooth from the youth’s lower jaw let the researchers estimate when the surgery took place.

Until now, the oldest known amputation involved a farmer from France whose left forearm was surgically removed nearly 7,000 years ago. In North Africa, surgeries to create skull openings may have occurred as early as 13,000 years ago (SN: 3/31/22).

Faced with rapid wound infections in a tropical region, ancient people on Borneo developed antiseptic treatments from local plants, Maloney’s group suspects. It’s unknown what type of tool was used in the Stone Age operation or whether the patient was sedated with a plant-based concoction.

In Tom Edison’s Shaggy Dog, a short story by Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Edison discovers that dogs are intellectually superior beings. They’re so smart, in fact, that the canines found the easiest possible way to survive: endearing themselves to humans. When Edison confronts his own dog about this revelation, the dog says, “Look, Mr. Edison. Why not keep quiet about this? It’s been working out to everybody’s satisfaction for hundreds of thousands of years. Let sleeping dogs lie.”

It’s true that humankind’s close relationship with canines spans millennia (SN: 7/18/17). This long-term interspecies friendship is a topic of intense scientific study, though where, when and even why it began remains murky (SN: 7/6/17). Short a talking dog, scientists have had to rely on archaeological and genetic evidence for clues (SN: 6/2/16). But the similarities between wolves and early domesticated dogs can make it challenging for researchers to tell them apart. In the earliest days, before wolves were fully domesticated, perhaps the most notable difference is simply the animals’ involvement with people.
That’s where storytelling can help, says historian Julien d’Huy of the College of France in Paris. Our penchant for mythologizing canine companions may be just as ancient as our relationship with them, so d’Huy is turning to these stories in a bid to shed more light on the history of dog domestication.

Some historians argue that using mythology to track human migration and the spread of information is unreliable because stories change quickly (SN: 1/19/16). D’Huy disagrees: Dogs play a starring role in many cultural origin stories, and since these myths are central to identity, that gives them stability over time, he says.

“With mythology, we can have explanations of archaeology, we can have reasons for domestication, we can test hypotheses,” he says.
D’Huy found three core storylines for the earliest myths related to dogs: The first links dogs with the afterlife, the second relates to the union of humans and dogs, and the third associates a dog with the star Sirius. Versions of these stories are found in many cultural regions around the world. He then borrowed statistical tools from biology to create family trees of myths, showing how the stories evolved as they followed humans from one region of the world to another.

Folktales about dogs stemmed from Central and Eastern Asia and spread to Europe, the Americas and later Australia and Africa, d’Huy reports in the June Anthropozoologica. This mythological travel route parallels a proposed path of dog domestication borne out by genetic and fossil evidence (SN: 3/1/21).

“This was a surprise,” d’Huy says. He wasn’t sure if dogs and our mythology about them would migrate together.

“It is certainly arguable that dogs were first domesticated in Asia,” says Pat Shipman, a retired paleoanthropologist and author of Our Oldest Companions: The Story of the First Dogs. Using mythology is a clever way to peer into the past, she says, because it can provide insight into how ancient humans valued dogs.

The prevalence of ancient myths identifying dogs as guides to the afterlife hint that our ancestors initially domesticated wolves not for hunting partners, as commonly believed, but for spiritual and symbolic reasons, d’Huy argues. This hypothesis fits with certain archaeological finds, he says, such as a 14,000-year-old grave in Germany containing a couple and two dogs. The woman was found with her hand resting on one of the dogs’ heads.

D’Huy is applying these methods to study how ancient myths can inform what we know about our connection with other animals such as sheep — their mythological link with the sun could have led to domestication. Symbolic, rather than utilitarian, reasons for domestication could explain a lot of data, he says.

“Comparative mythology has something to say in the world of research,” he says. “Something very precious to say, I think.”