Notes & Queries, 26th November, 2013: Why do dogs come in so many sizes?
image generated by Grok If we dispel from our minds any notions of a Garden of Eden, where God created the animals, who were in turn named by Adam, then we must consign our ancestors to the wilderness. There was never a paradise, nor was there any biblical fall from grace. There was only a bloody uphill struggle; a race to the top of the food chain. Out of necessity, early man would have categorised some animals as potential sources of food and others as dangerous predators; less frequently, he would regard some as allies. In that clouded era of human history, dogs were a presence lurking furtively in the corner of the eye. They were paw prints, pressed into the wet mud at dawn, marking out the perimeters of the earliest human settlements. At night they were silhouettes skulking around on the margins of temporary encampments. Gradually, over the seasons; down through the years, and the decades, and the centuries; across the overlap of the generations, they inched closer to the warmth a...