Natural History

Nearly a year ago, I wrote about the discovery of a canine skull in the Goyet Cave in Belgium. This skull had the distinctive features of a dog skull, but  when it was dated, it was found to be 31,700 years old. The next oldest accepted dog remains date to 14,000 years ago and were found in Russia.

The current research on the DNA of domestic dogs suggests that they are 16,000 years old anddescend from a southern Chinese population of wolves. (Another study suggests that this finding may be incorrect.)

So how do we reconcile these two contradictory pieces of evidence?

Well, the real problem is that we currently have a clearly defined idea of what a wolf is and what a dog is. However, it is very likely that this definition is a relatively recent phenomenon in the history of our species. I had an interesting discussion on this post, which was about rather unusual relationship among the Native Americans of the Great Plains, wolves, and domestic dogs. In this hunting society, the defining line between dog and wolf was rather nebulous. (I think they could tell the difference between the two, because the dogs didn’t hunt bison. These wolves were well-known for hunting bison, which is why they are called “Buffalo wolves.” And yes, they still exist.)

When you read the study on the Goyet wolves and dogs and those from Russia and the Ukraine, you notice how genetically diverse the wolf population originally was. It is very likely that there were some wolves that had developed some doggish traits, probably through a semi-domesticated relationship, like the account of the wolves and the Beothuk.

One problem with accepting the Goyet canine as a dog is that there is a huge gap between that dog skull and the next oldest dog remains. A gap has been created, and it doesn’t fit well with the other studies. It violates the scientific principle of parsimony, and thus, it is not yet universally accepted as a dog.

The reason why dogs appear to disappear from the archeological record is that dogs were domesticated several times throughout history.  Because humans were not established as we are now, the conditions that allowed them to keep or have a relationship with “dogs” may have disappeared, and the dogs were forced to return to their ancestral form.

Now, I don’t doubt that this aspect may have led to the disappearance of “dogs” from the archeological record.

However, I think something else might have been at work here. Until Stanley Olsen began examining  the remains of dogs at archeological sites, dog remains were simply thrown away. They weren’t worth studying, and it was nearly impossible for Olsen to get a grant to study dogs in archeological sites.

Because archeology wasn’t interested in these dogs, we don’t have much of a record of them. Who knows what interesting dog or wolf remains have been lost?

I think the Goyet Cave “dog” is a very important find. More research has to be done.

I also think we need to be very careful of the findings that suggest a definite Chinese origin of the domestic dog. It is possible that there were European and East Asian populations of domestic dogs, and the East Asian population wound up replacing the European one, at least through its matriline. (The Savolainien studies are MtDNA studies and are studies of maternal inheritance.) It is also possible that we still don’t have the foggiest clue about where dogs originated because the assumptions do not take into account the diversity of original wolf populations and the fact that the oldest populations of wolves are also from Asia.

But I’m no longer going to parrot the line that we know where dogs come from. It’s all up in the air now. My educated guess is that they are towards the older end of the spectrum, and dogs and wolves have exchanged genes too much for us to pinpoint the exact place for that domestication.

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I’m going to do a post on the dog featured at the top of the post. He has a very interesting story.