Tricpe's thread "funny gif" (link) prompted me to see if I could find any literature or video on canine intelligence, specifically their ability to understand the gesture of pointing, and I found this video. Watching it, I was surprised to learn that not only can dogs understand when a human being points with her hands, but they can also understand when a human "points" with her eyes.
Chimpanzees, in spite of being more intelligent than dogs, do not understand the gesture.
This, by the way, also raises the question, will a sentient extra-terrestrial species understand pointing? Will they understand any human gestures or body language at all?
Carl Sagan, by his own admittance, said that one of the shortcomings of the Pioneer Plaques is the use of an arrow to indicate the probes were launched from the third planet from the sun. Arrows seem intuitive to us because we descend from culture of hunter-gatherers. An intelligent extra-terrestrial species, however, may not understand the use of an arrow as pointing symbol if they did not evolve from a hunter-gatherer cultural heritage.
There's a documentary on Netflix about this. It's called "Dogs Decoded".
Is that where the Youtube clip is from? I would love to see the whole thing.
Any species would understand a triangle as a pointing symbol, but that one was far too cryptic
The real problem is they set back translation by at least fifty years by putting bobbies on it.
