Mark Derr takes on a recent New York Times piece that quotes experts making claims like this one.
In doing so, he also explains several of the theses in his book, How the Dog Became the Dog.
Hint: That theory that Raymond Coppinger and others like to promote probably isn’t true.
Excellent food for thought.
“It is far more plausible, based on what is known of human and wolf behavior, to assume that Paleohunters were following wolves or following ravens or some other bird following wolves to game. The hunters would step in to complete a kill or steal a fresh wolf kill. In turn, the wolves would try to steal it back. Wolves are known to follow human hunters, too, in hope of running down a wounded animal or scavenging what was left behind.”
This kind of cooperative/competitive hunting behavior has been definitvely documented, especially in canids, as in coyotes and badgers, or jackals and ratels. Birds, such as Goshawks also engage in this kind of activity w/ ground predators.
The NYT article is about stray dogs. It does not matter whether Coppinger or Derr are right or wrong; the stray dogs will be there till somebody summons the political will to kill them. Coppinger vs Derr makes no difference; the idea that Coppinger’s idea or anyone’s idea explains the stray dog problem is just nonsense to me.
However, stray dogs aside, if we want to argue about origins of dog, the dog’s habits, whether co-operative hunter or dumpster diver, shed no light on the issue as far as I can see. For one thing, we are arguing without evidence. For another, the dog and wolf are demonstrably both scavengers and co-operative hunters. The only generalization we can safely make is that they (like most animals) are opportunists. Of course, that gets us just nowhere because we have lots of little opportunists and co-operative hunters that are not domesticated. So we are still left with the question of domestication. I think Coppinger’s arguments are far-fetched just because he creates elaborate scenarios in the absence of evidence, but that does not prove that Derr is right. They might both be half-right, half-wrong, or all-wrong.
If we want to ask what the Indian pariah dog is, though, that’s a whole other question, not necessarily connected to the question of dogs’ origins. There are, in India, dogs that look like coarse basenjis. There are dogs like that in SE Asia, also. I would like to see some of them move and see their daily lives filmed so I could decide for myself whether they are some sort of basenji. Not that that should convince anyone else. But just suppose they are basenjis (as opposed to dingos, say). I still won’t know whether they went from East to West or vice versa. Or when. Or whether there was always some back and forth movement. Then there is this Yellow Dog. The basenji usually is short-bodied, curly-tailed and having Irish markings. This yellow dog looks a bit like a sight hound, a bit like a dingo, but could be anything. Conformation is wrong for sight hound, coat and conformation are all wrong for dingo. So, the pariah can be distinguished from basenji, from dingo, and from sight hound. The pariah may be its own land race to which basenjis, sight hounds, western dogs, etc. have been added. Or derived. Yep, that’s what I think. So, where did they come from? I dunno, but I have a few concerns about our thinking.
Until a few years ago everyone on earth could tell a dog from a wolf. Then along came the molecular biologists to tell us they are the same. Spread the Word: your eyes deceive you; Science has the answer and, of course, it’s counter-intuitive, as we think it should be. As we all know, it is well nigh impossible for any lay person to make an argument based on DNA. But I don’t have to. A science that tells me my perceptions are wrong might be right, but it still must explain the perception itself. That is also a scientific question.
I am hoping that dog and wolf will turn out to be related as brown and polar bear are related, with a lot of mtDNA in there from recent back crosses confusing the issue. I hope someone investigates this possibility soon because I fear our wolves are becoming so swamped with dog genes that eventually they really will be the same animal, at least those that have not turned into coyotes.
If dog and wolf separated long ago, say early pleistocene, with wolf occupying the northern part of the common range and dog (pariah) occupying the southern, then that would give H erectus and dog a million or so years to get acquainted. It would remove the burden of explaining how we domesticated this very wild animal (the gray wolf) in such a very short time.
Just sayin’.
You’re still assuming that this pariah dog is the transitional form between a dog and wolf.
It’s not.
Dogs were domesticated from wolves throughout the range of the wolf, including northern Europe, as we’ve seen in Norwegian elkhounds and other Scandinavian hunting and herding dogs.
Nope. I said, “If we want to ask what the Indian pariah dog is, though, that’s a whole other question, not necessarily connected to the question of dogs’ origins.” I was trying to cover a lot of questions in one post. I think we do not know what the pariah is, but it certainly is a domestic dog as much as is a beagle or whatever. A lot of people talk about “primitive” dogs. I don’t believe in any such thing. I think they are all DDs – the dingo is a DD, the pariah is a DD, etc. The gray wolf is not a DD. That’s how I classify them.
What the transition was we do not know. Maybe it was just a wolf, but could be that dog split from wolf before domestication. If that was the case, though, the first dog was no more a pariah than it was a beagle. Both are equally modern DDs, IMO.