Dogs: How They Made Us Human: Belgium and France

Catalog description

A funny thing happened in Western Europe during and at the end of the last ice age. Humans began the process of making a deep and lasting friendship with a non-human species?wolves, and in that process a new species arose?Canis familiaris (dogs) and it changed humans forever. This program takes students on an immersive trip through Belgium & France where we will visit sites that relate to the co-evolution of dogs and humans to improve our understanding of how humans came to be who we are today. We will visit cities, archeological sites, training areas, and the countryside in order to fulfill this objective. We will trace the bond of humans and dogs through ancient history, the Middle Ages and into modern times, integrating elements of science, archeology, anthropology, law, history, and art to show the impact of dogs and humans on one another for over 30,000 years. We?ll spend time in the first site showing evidence of dog domestication, visit a wolf sanctuary, we?ll visit Leonardo da Vinci?s final home and find out about dogs in art, and we?ll compare how people relate to horses vs. dogs, animals that were both vitally important in human history. This trip will feature plenty of time to reflect on what we?ve seen and done but you will be challenging yourself to understand why we domesticated dogs and how dogs changed the course of human history, and in some sense, domesticated us. You?ll never think about dogs and humans the same way!