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Prehistoric Dogs

"dogs and man in the Garden of Eve"

While AN ABUNDANCE of scattered bones indicates that people living at the end of the Ice Age were at least aware of the existence of canines, the exact circumstances under which these two species first came together is a highly speculative subject. Fragmentary material evidence in the form of bones, teeth, primitive pictorial art and sculptures, combined with more recent observations of surviving aboriginal people and dogs, have inspired scholars to construct plausible scenarios of early encounters between people and canids. Still, questions about the formative years of this relationship persist. Was it adversarial in nature, a cooperative venture centering around food procurement, something more intangible based on the emotional needs of each species, or a mixture of all three?

That the lives of these two species became intertwined early on, spanning at least sixty centuries, and have remained so to this day is all the more remarkable because so much of our evolution occurred in vastly dif- ferent environments: broken and open grasslands for canids and thick, protective forests for hominids (members of the primate family who gave rise - to modern man). Yet both ultimately prevailed as mobile, intelligent, highly organized predators capable of adapting to virtually any habitat.

Our own ancestors were a physically puny lot compared with the scrappy wild progenitors of modern dogs. Once the forebears of Homo sapiens moved away from the sheltering forests where they had evolved for countless generations, they were virtually defenseless against roaming V predators and other perilous aspects of life on open savannas. But early hominids were endowed with several critical physical features -- keen eye-sight, opposable thumbs, and bipedal gait -- which were the springboards for rapid intellectual development.

Stereovision (eyes facing forward) gave hominids exceptional visual acuity both close up and over great distances, which was essential to detecting hidden dangers and probably inadvertently contributed to the decline of the other senses, notably smell and hearing. This advantage was further enhanced by strengthened torso musculature and changes in skeletal structure, enabling our progenitors to stand and move about on two limbs instead of four. And with the hands freed from the task of locomotion they could be used to do the bidding of the mind, to collect naturally occurring items such as river stones or sticks, materials now reinterpreted as digging, cutting, or crushing tools. Though crude in form, ‘ such implements reflected man’s emerging selfawareness and desire to ef fect change in the environment for his benefit, setting a trend in human thinking that continues to this day Rather than remaining passive users or victims of the natural order, our ancestors began to envision future needs and plan accordingly Armed with tools and the propensity to learn and adapt, humankind assumed a new way of life-in extended family units as hunter-gatherers, migrating with the seasons to prey on herds of bison, ` caribou, and other plentiful, large herbivores.

Writing about the cave of Lascaux in France, paleontologist Yves Coppens describes the "millions of objects of stone, bone, ivory or deer antler, weapons, implements, coloring stuffs, items of dress or offering" which tell us how prehistoric societies blossomed. "Across the whole of Europe new communities formed and cultures grew up parallel with each other, diffusing and interpenetrating . . . punctuated by all sorts of technical in- ventions and improvements, increasing people’s comfort and raising their standard of living." Some paleoanthropologists speculate that the lives of these prehistoric hunters were similar t0 those led by migratory bands of Inuit (Eskimos) in more recent times, living in caves or lodges constructed of hide, bones, and rock, harvesting large animals in accordance with their seasonable availability

British Museum zooarchaeologistjuliet Clutton-Brock points out that "a unique and paradoxical feature of man is that he is a tropical, omnivorous primate whose exceptional success as a species began to accelerate only when he became a social hunter in a subarctic environment? Early human intellectual growth occurred in surges, first when sufficient tool-making and fire-handling skills developed to support survival in semi-glacial conditions at least fifteen thousand years ago. It was during this relatively recent past that humans and wolves, the likely forebears of modern dogs, first encountered one another. The hunting of large Pleistocene mammals was time-consuming, exhausting, and dangerous, so it may be that the first encounters between humans and wolves were anything but friendly, especially if they took place over hard-earned kills. Another possibility is that as humans encroached upon canid territory wolves gradually came to recognize them as an integral part of their domain. Attracted to butchering activities, cooking fires, rancid bones, and refuse, the animals redefined their territory to encompass human campsites and opted to follow people as they moved from region to region.

Tantalizing hints that a relationship of some sort was forming between people and wolves during this era come from La Grotte du Lazaret, a 125,000-year-old complex of Paleolithic shelters discovered in France in 1969, where wolf skulls appear to have been set at the entrance of each dwelling, leading excavators to speculate that canids already were incorporated into some aspect of human culture at this very early stage. Sites such as this rarely offer more than a few fragmented bits of animal bone to indicate the beginnings of the human-canid relationship. It therefore is sheer speculation as to how the relationship between humans and wolves shifted from noninteractive or adversarial exchanges to something more tolerant and complex. Perhaps fear or hostile competition was replaced by admiration for the wolf ’s hunting prowess and tactics. Or the wolf’s exceptional hearing and sense of smell that facilitates early prey detection led primitive people to attribute supernatural powers t0 the animals, and inspired the creation of rituals to endow human hunters with similar powers. Pleistocene people may have learned the benefits of observing wolves for behavioral cues that indicated prey was nearby or of mimicking some of their stealthy hunting strategies.

Historical and contemporary accounts of aboriginal people are tenuous at best, but may offer some possibilities to fill in the gaps in the ar- chaeological record. An 1870 account of Native American hunting forays on the western plains by the Reverend J.G. Wood describes how "wolves follow the hunter for weeks for olfal of the beasts which he kills. They will not venture to harm him, but follow him by day at a distance of half a mile or so, and at night, when he lies down to sleep, they will couch also at a respectful distance." Realizing that wolves could remain close to prey with- out scaring it away some Plains Indian hunters camouflaged themselves in wolf skins "so that when they go on all fours the head of the wolf projects just above their own head," in the process lulling bison and other her- bivores into a false sense of security ,

Changes in the dentition and facial structure of wolves have been touted as proof of a friendly (or at least civil) relationship between people 1 and canids, manifesting the first signs of domestication. All kinds of domesticated mammals, from sheep and pigs to cattle and dogs, exhibit dif ' , ferences in their physical or behavioral makeup from their wild progenitors, alterations thought to have been triggered by interactive, multigenerational associations with people, and growing isolation from the natural selection process. At a twenty-five-thousand-year-old mammoth hunting camp in the Ukraine, for instance, some distinctive wolf skulls were found along with the butchered remains of at least 166 mammoths. The skulls were markedly different from those of average wild wolves, with many of them exhibiting foreshortened muzzles, diminished tooth size, and teeth crowding, all traits hailed as more common to domestic dogs than wolves.

But if the progenitors of domestic dogs figured heavily in the daily lives of Paleolithic hunters, as suggested by such intriguing remains, why has so little evidence been found to support the assertion that canids were integral members of lce Age human society? All too often only small bits of canid bones and teeth are recovered, and Pleistocene pictorial art-such as the famous cave paintings at Lascaux or the more recently discovered Cosquer caves and Chauvet grotto-while depicting in meticulous detail a host of prey animals, fails to feature anything that can be definitively pointed to as a wolf or dog. It is the absence of such vital clues that continues to thwart the best elforts of zooarchaeologists--and in a sense, constitutes the beginning of the "lost history" of the canine race.

Submitted by Mary Elizabeth Thurston.

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