[The smallest toy dog from the Roman empire]. / Der kleinste Zwerghund aus der Römischen Kaiserzeit.

This study deals with osseous remains of the smallest breed of dogs found in deposits related to the Roman Imperial period. The bone material has been collected at the Colonia Ulpia Traiana near Xanten on the Rhine. It has been observed that the bones match in size with the smallest breeds of dogs known today.

[Pathologically changed skeletal remains of baboons from ancient Egyptian times]. / Krankhaft veränderte Skelettreste von Pavianen aus altägyptischer Zeit.

Numerous pathologically altered skeletal remains of baboons originating from the galleries under the temple of the god Thot in Tuna el-Gebel/Middle Egypt reveal that these animals were kept in non-appropriate conditions during ancient Egyptian time. This statement is also supported by the low average age of the baboons. Inter alia an extremely deformed skull is described.

[Domestication and its sequelae]. / Die Domestikation und ihre Folgen.

The domestication of the dog took place in the late Glacial. Its earliest record comes from Oberkassel near Bonn and its age is some 14000 years B.C. On the other side the domestication of the farm animals began about 10000 years ago, during the so-called Neolithic Revolution, when man's way of life changed basicly from the hunter-and gatherer-culture to agriculture and animal husbandry. This change took place in the valleys and on the slopes of the mountains surrounding the basin of the Euphrat and Tigris rivers which is called the Fertile Crescent. Sheep and goat were succeeded by pig and cattle. Immediately after the transition to domestication with protection by human being taking the place of natural selection the livestock animals and the dog underwent a decrease in size. This reduction in size is one of the most important criteria for distinguishing prehistoric domestic livestock from their wild forms. In high developed cultures domestication resulted in a hardly imaginable morphological and physiological extension of variability, in a richness of forms not to be guessed by the whole potential of the corresponding ancestors. But all these rich appearing forms were due to intraspecific procedures. They don't create new species. By the way of the increasing influence of man and its domestic animals on the environment the procedure of domestication is more and more shifted in the foreground and increasingly intervenes with the interests of wild life.