Charles Darwin is celebrated for his claim that man and primates developed from a common ancestor. Man has been, since Darwin, treated by science as a biological species and scientists often compare his faculties to the instincts of animals. At the same time, the other side of Darwin’s discovery is forgotten – animals are similar to man in their behaviour and emotions. While for Darwin himself an anthropomorphic view of animals was self-evident, many contemporary Darwinists prefer a mechanical model. These two contradictory tendencies are established here by reference to the work of the biologists Richard Dawkins and Frans de Waal. The difference of perspective from which animals are viewed can be best seen in connection with the problem-area of morality and its evolutionary origin. It is shown that the empirical orientation of de Waal is fundamentally closer to the Darwinian tradition of research than Dawkins’ theoretical approach.
The subject of the presented article is the processing of archaeozoological finds from the Early Middle Age settlement in Brno-Medlánky. This relatively small set consists of two different groups of osteological material. The first represents fragments of bones and teeth coming from the so-called kitchen waste. This set was processed by standard methods consisting in determining the anatomical affiliation, species, age, or sex, and the evidence of traces of manipulation (cutting, chopping, biting). The second group of finds representing several complete skeletons of animals is quite significant, as some of the animals were not consumed. Within the three features, 3 canine (2× a dog, 1× a wolf?), a horse and a pig skeleton in the secondary position were captured. Even in these cases, the basic characteristics of the animals were recorded, including age, sex, height, and post-mortem manipulation. The presence of preserved animal bodies from the settlement in Medlánky was compared with other documented finds of skeletons of animals from this period.