By: Logan He
A dog sniffed up 5,000-year-old remains on a sunny day in Croatia. Archaeologist Vedrana Glavaš had grown up with the landscape and knew it very well. However, it was the dog who helped her find the bones.
Back in 2014, she went with a team to Verbit Mountain, where they unearthed fragments of a 3,000-year-old hill fort and necropolis. To have a deeper analysis of the discovery, she needed more aid. They soon found that they could use special dogs to sniff it out. These dogs were used to sniff out mass graves and were extremely accurate.
Dog noses are 10,000 times better than ours; they can smell everything to the trillionth compound. They can pick up body smell and track down the person.
Dogs have to be specially trained to sense the right way. Vallulv, a Swedish Archaeologist, began to train a German shepherd named Fabel in 2013 when she was only 5 months old. Their training starts indoors and then goes outside in order for the dogs to get a different feel. Interestingly, they use real grinded bones for training. But the trainers have to use gloves to not mess up the odor. The trainer would bury the grinded bones and tell the dog to find it. The dog will naturally learn that she has to bark when she finds something. When the dog finished training, she could smell 10 month old bones 6 inches into the ground. In an experiment she found bones 35,000 years old. With this training, they can achieve an accuracy of 94.2%.
Besides smelling out ancient bones they can smell out criminals and drug dealers at the airport. Dogs can be helpful in many ways like a guidance dog or a firefighter dog or even fight for our nation on the battlefield. Sometimes dogs are underappreciated because we do not regularly thank our hard working dogs or have a holiday for them.
Many people think that dogs are even better than robots in finding things with its nose. They are like super computers when it comes to sniffing.