I started thinking about that one post about how from dogs POV humans are beings that live like 500+ years (because I was petting my dog and I was looking at her like “thirty thousand years of cooperation have led to this. our species have spent 30k years building up to the point where you, child of wolf, descendant of noble hunters and wild things, would come all the way out of the office and come sit with me in the hopes of letting a souped up monkey rub its paws on you”)
and then I thought about what it must have been like for the first humans to let a fucking wolf, maybe only a few generations from the wild, behold their infant child. Like man can u believe that? Maybe this alliance is only a few years old and sure you’ve seen the wolf’s kids but now you’ve got one of your own. And even though you’ve seen this wolf tear out the throats of creatures that could kill you, this wolf is your family. This wolf is your friend, you love them and they love you and you gotta show ‘em the new kid, look, friend, I had a child. I know you are wild and dangerous, but look at this, my most precious thing, sniff him, give him a lil lick, his children and your children will be bound together for thirty thousand fucking years because I love you
There’s a set of preserved footprints from 30k years ago that is a young child and a wolf standing side by side
can you fucking imagine? Maybe the kid’s mom was like “hey go get some water from the stream, but take the wolf with you. I trust him, he will protect you.”
One of my favourite bits of media history trivia is that back in the Elizabethan period, people used to publish unauthorised copies of plays by sending someone who was good with shorthand to discretely write down all of the play’s dialogue while they watched it, then reconstructing the play by combining those notes with audience interviews to recover the stage directions; in some cases, these unauthorised copies are the only record of a given play that survives to the present day. It’s one of my favourites for two reasons:
It demonstrates that piracy has always lay at the heart of media preservation; and
Imagine being the 1603 equivalent of the guy with the cell phone camera in the movie theatre, furtively scribbling down notes in a little book and hoping Shakespeare himself doesn’t catch you.
