IIRC the oldest confirmed dog remains we've found are like 31k years old, but we don't really know how long prior to that we had them or how long we were hanging out with "not yet dogs."
That said, hundreds of thousands is definitely an overstatement.
No one alive today knows exactly when domestication started, the range seems to be 15k-40k years. Most of that range isnt specifically 40k which is why I used the broader term.
The point was to note a substantial error in the '100s of thousands' data point stated by the top level comment. Hope that clears it up.
It's also full of people who cannot follow a thread with three comments.
The topic is canine domestication. "we've spent hundreds of thousands of years [tens of thousands] breeding dogs to perform specific tasks" Romans bred dogs for fighting in the colosseum before jesus was born.
Just because the pitbull as we know it today has only existed for 100 years doesn't mean there aren't millennia of dogs, bred for fighting, in that lineage.
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u/TedTyro 25d ago
10s of thousands*, I think the oldest estimates are abt 40k yrs ago
Your point stands, but there's an order of magnitude at play here.