That roasting meat leads to another question.
Cooked foods is one of the things that allowed our brains to grow. Digestion of raw foods takes up considerable energy and it takes considerable energy to operate our brains. A lot of what we give our dogs is cooked food. I can’t help but wonder if dogs are growing more intelligent as a result. (outside of deliberate breeding for other traits)
In. Ter. Esting!
I read of an interesting study once where they had people wear special glasses that could track the movements of their eyes. They found that when a human encounters another human or animal, one of the things we do is we look fleetingly at a single eye before looking at the face as a whole. That little scan from a single eye to both eyes or the face is so fast that people generally don’t or cant register it. But the glasses picked up the movement. And they found that we did it when we saw animals, too.
So that made them curious. They began to measure the eye movements of non-humans, and they discovered that of all the creatures in the animal kingdom (that they found a way to measure) none of them did this rapid eye scan, except one.
Dogs.
Dogs not only did it too, but they scanned the same eye in that rapid eye scan. (I can’t remember if it is the the left or the right eye, but it is the same one)