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The end of 2015 brought a rush of dog-related news, including a study definitively placing the emergence of the dog from the wolf in extreme southern East Asia 33,000 years ago and a prediction in Science magazine that 2016 could be the year when the time and place[s] of the dog’s emergence would definitively be revealed. Then, on January 19 of the new year, the New York Times weighed in with a rather confused piece by James Gorman trumpeting, as Science had, the multinational study, headed by Greger Larson and Keith Dobney, to use DNA from ancient dogs and wolves to answer the questions of time and place.
Those are important questions to be sure, and they have proven difficult to answer, with proposed dates ranging from 135,000 to 10,000 years ago and places ranging from the Middle East to the Mammoth Steppe, Central Asia, and southern East Asia, south of the Yangzi River. My response to that plethora of choices has been to say wolves and humans took up wherever they met on the trail. Not all of those hook-ups produced dogs, but one or more did. If I had to choose again, I would pick the Altai Mountains of Mongolia and Siberia, the Caucasus Mountains-Caspian Sea region and an area now under the Persian Gulf. The central requirement is that wolves and humans be in that place at the same time.
The two most recent genetic surveys place the first dogs in Asia. The first to arrive was a survey in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) of village dogs in Central Asia, including Nepal and Mongolia, from Adam Boyko’s village dog project at Cornell University. The study placed the first dogs in Mongolia and Nepal 16,000 or so years ago. [See my blog post here.] Barely a month later Guo-dong Wang of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and an international group including Peter Savolainen of the KTH-Royal Institute of Technology, Solna, Sweden, said in Cell Research that the first dogs emerged in southern East Asia 33,000 years ago. There they apparently increased in number until they began following humans westward 18,000 years later. Wang and colleagues say the dogs reached the Middle East and North Africa15,000 years ago and Europe 10,000 years ago. On the road to Europe, a lineage split off for the Altai Mountains to mix with northern Chinese dogs before proceeding to the Americas. The researchers relied on mitochondrial DNA, the Y chromosome’s DNA, and nuclear DNA to reach their conclusions, which they say reveal the history of early dog travels across the world.
The part of this research with the date and place of origin drew headlines as soon as it was released without a mention of the presence in the Altai Mountains of a so-called incipient dog. This animal’s partial remains were found in Razboinichya Cave and dated to 33,000 years ago. Surely, the presence of this animal demands at least a footnote in the ‘definitive’ new work even though it has been said not to have contributed any genes to modern dogs.
None of the reports I saw make much of the general absence of physical evidence of dogs and wolves from southern East Asia 33,000 years ago, nor is there an explanation for the 18,000 year gap between the dogs’ emergence in southern East Asia and their arrival in the Middle East.The 5,000 years from the Middle East to Europe are similarly unaccounted for. These newcomers would have arrived after dogs already existed in Europe, but how that could be, since these travelers were descendants of the first and only dogs, according to the researchers, is not explained.
It is common in reports on the time and place of dogs’ emergence to add what is known as boilerplate language claiming that the way the transformation occurred is agreed upon by most scientists. I have seen no poll on the question, but even if it was subject to scientific consensus, that does not mean it is true. The history of science is littered with received wisdom, consensus truths that have failed, including those regarding dogs.
Until very recently, for example, the absolute ‘truth’ about dog origins held that wolves chowing down at the Mesolithic village dump were allowed to stay unmolested by humans only if they were docile or tame toward them. Over time, those self-selected wolves interbred and became a population of what I have called sniveling dump-divers who insinuated themselves into the lives of the villagers.
That narrative had many faults, but it faltered when it became clear that dogs originated not in semi-permanent Mesolithic villages but in and around the encampments of Paleolithic hunters and gatherers. The replacement narrative is still being revised, but here is James Gorman’s summary for the New York Times: “Imagine that some ancient wolves were slightly less timid around nomadic hunters and scavenged regularly from their kills and camps, and gradually evolved to become tamer and tamer, producing lots of offspring because of the relatively easy pickings. At some point, they became the tail-wagging beggar now celebrated as man’s best friend.”
From a certain standpoint, that represents an improvement over the previous version, but it is noteworthy for its vagueness and sloppy use of language—to be less “timid” is not to be “tamer,” for example, and to be “tamer” is not necessarily to become “a tail-wagging beggar.” If they were already successfully scavenging in and around kill sites and camps, why would they be under pressure to so dramatically change their nature? Gorman invokes evolution but his narrative requires acceptance of the notion that dogs either “invented” themselves, as if a bunch of wolves decided at some point to ignore natural selection and direct their own evolution, or resulted from a conversion experience or a magical incantation. In any case, they go from being free beings to sniveling beggars. Gorman glides past the mechanism for the transformation of wolf to dog while suggesting that its chief benefit was to free dogs from the dangers of hunting “elk”—not a favorite of wolves in most parts of their historic range—but rhetoric counts for more than facts in his discussion of the converted wolf who in the guise of the loving “house dog” has evolved into a “parasite.” He attributes that description to Raymond Coppinger, emeritus professor of biology at Hampshire College.
Coppinger has been making that argument for years in books and interviews with journalists. Whether Gorman takes his lead from Coppinger or someone else for the discussion that follows he fails to say, but he does claim that the majority of the world’s estimated one-billion dogs are free-ranging street dogs scrounging a marginal existence around human settlements until someone occasionally slips them a morsel. They don’t form packs. They are utterly promiscuous. The males contribute nothing to the raising of their pups. Gorman and his source should take some time to review the growing literature on free-ranging dogs and the variety of behaviors and social structures found within what is the world’s largest group of medium to large carnivores. Free-Ranging Dogs & Wildlife Conservation, edited by Matthew E. Gompper is a good place to start. Or he can consider the work on free-ranging Indian dogs by S.K. Pal. Pal found that all six female dogs in his study exercised at least some degree of choice in mates, while 4 of the 6 females were monogamous. All fed their puppies through nursing and regurgitation. Four fathers/mates stayed with the litters and acted as guards, physically protecting them, if necessary, and one also fed them by regurgitating food.
Gorman and his source might also look at the relationship of village dogs to humans, which is often more complex than simplistic explanations show.
Indeed, among the broad group of free-ranging dogs are those, like dingoes, who are wild animals, but who nonetheless have a continuing relationship with humans. The relationship of dingoes and certain groups of Aborigines, in fact, serves as a model for that of certain wolves and Paleolithic humans.
Gorman’s article reflects the inaccurate assumption that wolves and humans have been enemies from first meeting because wolves pose a real and present danger; thus, to gain access to the human camp and food supply, they had to contain themselves, to become something else.
Humans fear and loathe the Big Bad Wolf, we are told, and humans could bring them into their camps and homes only if they were transformed.That is unlikely because Paleolithic hunters and gatherers were in all likelihood animists who imbued everything in nature with a spirit, a being. They routinely brought animals home and in some numbers if the animal was important in their lives. Wolves were important in locating prey because hunters could follow them by themselves or by following ravens who scavenge wolf kills. Wolf puppies, no matter how we wish to deny it, are cute. What needs to be explored is the way the naturally occurring socialization period in wolves and humans, which allowed for acceptance of the ‘other’ as one of your own ‘tribe,’ was extended considerably. The Austrian ethologist Wolfgang Schleidt has suggested that nursing mothers in the village must have been involved as nursemaids for young puppies. They would in some cases form strong bonds. It is also clear that some adult wolves are more curious and unafraid in approaching and even forming a relationship with humans and unrelated wolves than others. That seems especially true among the Arctic wolves today who follow the migrating herds of caribou in the Arctic. In the Pleistocene migrating herds and wolves trailing would have been more commonplace—think of bison on the Great Plains. Some of these wolves would have stayed in or near camps and reproduced there; others, less accepting, would have wondered off, but in time you might with luck have a group of fellow-travellers. Given the proper mix of isolation and inbreeding in one or more areas and some luck, you might end up with some animals on the extreme end of the socialization scale, allowing for formation of powerful bonds of attachment.
The dog resulted from a dynamic interplay of humans and wolves, two similar animals in so many ways who became reliant on each other.
