Try 8+ millennia. In Lake Baikal, Siberia, dogs were buried with respect equal to and sometimes better than a human burial purely due to emotional attachment, in a place where they served no utility for food gathering etc.
And if that doesn’t count, then it’s definitely been around since 50-ish CE when Christianity spread the idea of humans being innately terrible and undeserving of basically anything…
Try 8+ millennia. In Lake Baikal, Siberia, dogs were buried with respect equal to and sometimes better than a human burial purely due to emotional attachment, in a place where they served no utility for food gathering etc.
(source)
And if that doesn’t count, then it’s definitely been around since 50-ish CE when Christianity spread the idea of humans being innately terrible and undeserving of basically anything…