Translations:Benutzer:Arian/Klett-Mini-Test/567/en

The type variability found in dogs appears already at the very beginning of their domestication, towards the end of the *Tertiary* (Atlantis) in the *Pleistocene* (Ice Ages), and above all then in the *Neolithic*, in the first post-Atlantean ages. No domestic animal species that subsequently emerged has ever again attained this wealth of forms. It stands to reason, as already intimated earlier, that the development of domestic animals was a product of early humanity. Humanity was in a position, out of its living experience of the animal soul and of its spiritual origin — the group soul — to hold this soul back at a more embryonic stage in its bodily formation, and thereby to furnish the form-building type with an abundance of varied possibilities of expression. The younger the domestic animal species, the more human beings had exchanged their instinctive directness with the spirit for the awakening to self-consciousness, and the more impoverished in variation becomes the outward appearance of domestic animals. When in ancient Roman times the wealth of forms increased again (dwarf dog breeds), this is already a consequence of deliberate selective breeding, in the sense of crossing and selection. How much the domestication of dog and cat — and likewise of the other domestic animal species — from its very origins down to ancient Egyptian culture was not primarily a matter of practical usefulness, but rather how this usefulness was inseparably bound up with an instinctive, intimately sacred feeling, is borne out on one hand by the burial culture uniting human being and dog, and on the other by the veneration accorded to cats and to the divine being dwelling within them — a cult that reached its culmination towards the end of ancient Egyptian culture.