Posted in dog domestication, wolves, tagged Active Social Domestication Model, Active Social Model of dog domestication, dog domestication, Mark Derr on January 5, 2019|
Mark Derr has been writing critiques of the Coppinger model of dog domestication for decades. His best known work on the subject matter is How the Dog Became the Dog, but his ideas can be read in a more succinct place at this article at The Bark (but do buy the book!).
His analysis is worth your time to read. He largely agrees with this model, but he contends that it needs to be placed in a larger framework of Derr’s own work and that on Wolfgang Schleidt and Michael Shalter, which is linked on Jung’s website.
Derr contends that Jung and Pörtl’s ideas need to be placed in this line of scholarship to which I’d also add the work of Darcy Morey and Pat Shipman. They don’t agree with each other on some important particulars, and they may have quibbles with this new model. But both scholars have been publishing outside of the Coppinger model for quite some time.
What I find most interesting is how this scholarship is pretty well-known outside of the English-speaking countries, but in the US and the UK, the generally accepted model by virtually everyone is the Coppinger model. Part of it may be that North America is home to wolves that are not particularly admixed with dogs. Indeed, they are probably the most “pure” wild wolves anywhere in the range of Canis lupus. And Great Britain and Ireland have no wolves, and there is no chance of any wolves coming back to those islands, at least by their own volition.
However, in Germany and Russia, wolves are admixed with dogs, and in the case of Germany, it is not at all impossible to see wolves living near large urban centers.
So they have a much more practical understanding of what it is like to live near wolves that have quite a bit of gene flow from domestic dogs, and they are less likely to buy into models that see dog and wolf as fundamentally distinct entities.
North Americans are much more accepting of a dichotomy model, and we have a hard time with gene flow between Canis populations. Our laws want hard and fast species, but the thing about Canis is that none of them are hard and fast species.
So it is easy for North Americans to posit that wolves are unable to be domesticated, because modern North American wolves (for the most part) are reactive and timid predators that do kill both dogs and coyotes they find on the trail. They do, but they also do the same with other wolves. And sometimes they mate with those wolves, just as they will mate with dogs and coyotes.
The Coppinger model requires an assumption that all wolves living in history and in the present are these shy timid ones, but that’s not what the historical record shows. And it is certainly not what is seen on Ellesmere or Baffin Island, where the wolves have never been persecuted by man.
The Coppinger model requires us to create the gray wolf as a Neanderthal dog in which it is big in size, big-brained, and meant to hunt only large prey, and posit the dog as the modern human with a smaller brain and more flexible diet.
We need a model that can place the origin of dogs before the Mesolithic, and this Active Social Model goes along way in that direction.
Posted in dog domestication, wolves, tagged Active Social Model of dog domestication, Alpha, Czechoslovakian vlcak, Czechoslovakian wolfdog, dog domestication on December 22, 2018|
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I finally got around to watching Alpha, a film that depicts a fictionalized account of dog domestication. It is set 20,000 years ago in Europe, which means that it posits a European origin for the domestic dog, and because of this early date, it sets domestication in the time of Paleolithic hunter-gatherers.
The events in the film are backed in at least some of the literature on dog domestication. The oldest dog subfossil remains in existence that are not hotly debated as to belonging to a dog and not a wolf are the Bonn-Oberkassel dog, which dates to around 14,000 years ago. Yes, that’s about 6,000 years later than the events in Alpha, but we do have that paper positing European origins for the domestic dog that suggests an even older domestication event on that continent.
So it is potentially possible for the events in Alpha to be in keeping with some of the literature on dog domestication.
The film’s protagonist is Keda, who speaks a language that is called Solutrean, which is the name archaeologists have given to an industry culture in some parts of Paleolithic Europe. Because of the similarity between spearpoints from this Solutrean culture and some aboriginal North American peoples from roughly the same time period, some experts posited that European hunter-gatherers came across the North Atlantic following marine mammals along the ice flows, suggesting a European origin for some North American native people. Of course, this hypothesis has been dumped in light molecular data that show a Siberian origin for the indigenous people of the Americas.
Keda is the son of a Solutrean chief who wants his son to be a powerful and skilled hunter of big game, especially steppe bison, which are his people’s predominant prey species. Keda, though, is a bit soft with quarry. He refuses to finish off a wild boar that has been speared, and his father takes great umbrage with his temerity when it comes to the kill. But this is Keda’s first big hunting expedition, and his father really wants to teach his son the ways of his craft.
This world is not meant for those who cannot be crafty and tough. While sitting at a campfire, a cave lion absconds with one of the men. A memorial cairn is placed where the lion took the man, and they move on in search of meat in the hoof in a way that shows they accept their mortal fates in such a hostile environment. So Keda’s softness and excessive empathy might not be well-matched for such a lifestyle.
The hunting expedition reaches its climax when tribesmen and their close allies come across a herd of steppe bison. They stalk them in close, and they use their spear throws to drive them towards a cliff. Many fall off the cliff and die, and the Solutrean tribes can have their meat and hides and bones for another year. However, as they drive the bison off the cliff, one unusually recalcitrant one charges Keda and lifts him up with its horns and throws him off the cliff. He falls to a rock outcropping, where the tribe is forced to leave him for dead. A cairn is left in his memory on the cliff face, and his father and the hunters leave him to the ages.
It is at this point that film begins to play around with artistic license. Keda awakes when a griffon-type vulture tries to scavenge his carcass, and when Keda realizes that he is just resting on a ledge, he tries to climb down the steep cliff side with his badly injured leg. At that point, it starts to rain and the ravine below the cliff fills with water. He then jumps into the torrent below. Miraculously, he survives the fall and the rushing water, which I found a bit implausible. He then put his wounded leg back in order and begins looking around for a bit of food and shelter.
While he limps around, a pack of wolves shows up, but he manages to fight them off with the spearheads he’s carrying on his clothing and escape in a tree. He badly injures one of the wolves, which lies wounded beneath the tree.
I should note here that I am quite skeptical that Pleistocene wolves were particularly dangerous to people. As I’ve noted before, the wolves of Ellesmere and Baffin Island, which have never been intensely persecuted, are unusually curious and socially open with people. It seems to me that Eurasian wolves living 20,000 years ago would have had a similar curiosity about people, and thus, they would have been relatively easy for people to habituate them to our presence. I don’t think that an animal that was a much a threat to people as cave lions would have been trusted at all, and there would have been little of the empathy between people and wolves that could have led to any kind of partnership.
The empathy that Keda showed the boar, though, begins to cast upon the injured wolf. He muzzles the wolf and carries it to a cave, where he puts maggots on its wound to eat out any infection. He feeds the wolf a bit of the rabbit he manages to kill, and although the wolf is growling and surly through their initial interactions, the wolf eventually comes to trust Keda and within just a few scenes becomes as tame as any dog. Again, this is artistic license, but I think even those socially open wolves from the Pleistocene would still have had clearly-defined boundaries. They might have been friendly with people, but it is unlikely that they would have become that trusting at the first point of contact.
However, this part of the film does fit nicely with the recently posited Active Social Domestication Model in which human social interactions with wolves are the main catalyst behind creating the domestic dog. This model is relatively new, but it has a lot of explanatory power, especially when compared to the Coppinger Model, which just posits that scavenging wolves in at the middens Neolithic camps begat neotenic village dogs that were later selected for their working and hunting abilities and became the breeds of dog we have today.
Keda eventually realizes that the wolf is not going to leave his side, so he begins to show it even more empathy. He gets an idea that he could train this wolf to help him the hunt, and there are several scenes where he teaches the wolf to do commands. I doubt that this happened very much early on the domestication of the wolf, especially if we are to assume that humans and wolves developed a hunting symbiosis.
Indeed, the way Keda hunts with the wolf Is awfully unlikely. He uses the wolf to herd and flush wild boar, which he kills with a spear. Wolves can hunt wild boar that way, but it seems to me that the best way to use a wolf is as a “bay dog,” in which the wolf circles and distracts the quarry, holding it in one place so that a spear can be thrown.
Keda names the wolf “Alpha,” though he uses the Solutrean word for the term, and the two begin their journey to Keda’s home grounds. On their way, the man and wolf develop a tight bond. They play at the lake together, just the same way we would with our own dogs.
One night, a pack of wolves shows up at Keda’s campsite, a black wolf lures Alpha away from Keda. The black coloration is interesting, because it is quite rare in modern European wolves. It has only been introduced to wild wolves in modern times through crossing with dogs, including in North America where it was introduced to wolves from a dog living in either the Yukon or Northwest territories several thousand years ago. What we do know, though, is that this black coloration, which is conferred in wolves and is most dog breeds through a dominant allele, originated first in the population that led to domestic dogs.
As Keda makes his way back, the Pleistocene winter sets in. He now must travel without much food through the driving, blinding snow. Through a series of misadventures, he finds himself falling through the ice on a lake, and Alpha hears his distress and runs to rescue. The whole scene where the wolf comes to rescue Keda from the ice requires lots of artistic license, but it is visually spectacular.
Alpha and Keda are reunited and begin their long journey back to the home grounds. On their way, a pack of cave hyenas (a type of Pleistocene spotted hyena) chases them into a cave. Alpha and Keda await the hyenas in the cave. The snow piled up on the entrance of the cave quakes with their footsteps, but they do not enter. We soon learn the reason for their reluctance, a cave lion has been lurking deep with in the recesses of the cavern. It charges Keda and Alpha. Alpha fights the lion bravely, and Keda takes a deep breath and throws the spear, hoping it hits only the lion. It does, and Alpha survives, though pretty badly wounded. The lion provides some sustenance, and Keda and Alpha continue to make their way to the home grounds.
When Keda arrives home, he is quite ill, and he shows up with a very sick wolf on his mother and father’s doorstep. I can only imagine what it would have been like if such a scene had occurred in real life. If these people had no concept of partnering with a wolf, I bet their first compulsion would have been to club the wolf in the head for meat and fur. But Keda tells them they must care for Alpha too.
In the final scene, Keda is healed from his illness, and he sees a neonatal wolf puppy being held up by a priestess in an induction ceremony to the tribe. We then see Alpha nursing a litter of puppies. So, it turns out that after 90 minutes of film, we learn that Alpha is a female wolf. I wish there had been some mention the wolf’s sex earlier in the film, because I was honestly not prepared for the puppies.
The father of the puppies was apparently the black wolf, because one of the puppies is black, and thus, this detail would fit with the black coloration originating in the population that led to domestic dogs. The puppies grow up in the Solutrean tribe, and the final image of the film is the Solutrean hunting party going out on a hunting expedition with their wolves walking among them.
I will give this film props for doing quite a bit of research on some of the literature that puts dog domestication in the Paleolithic hunter-gatherer societies of Eurasia. It posits a possible origin for the domestic dog that came from the coming of age story of one of these Pleistocene hunters. However, the actual domestication of the dog from wolves in these societies had to have been a bit more complex than the film states. In one flashback of the film, Keda’s father discusses wolves howling around their camp and how men must behave like wolves if they are to be good hunters. Of course, the father uses the toxic memes of alpha wolves in both the canid and human society. I honestly could have done without either.
But this flashback does hint that these hunter-gatherer people had some empathy with wolves, and it is this empathy that humans had with wolves that allowed us to form this partnership. I am reminded very much of Schleidt and Shalter’s hypothesis that wolves showed man how to hunt ungulates in Eurasia more effectively.
Humans and wolves have sort of convergently evolved as cooperative hunters, and it is very likely that humans would have seen much of themselves in wolves. Plus, if Pleistocene wolves behaved like the wolves of Ellesmere, humans would not have feared them in the way they would have feared cave lions or hyenas. This is a large social carnivoran that hunts big game but does not typically target us, and those features provided just enough space curiosity, empathy, and even reverence to develop.
I think that the hunting symbiosis hypothesis for dog domestication is essentially correct, but I don’t think it came about because someone managed to tame a wolf and hunt with it. I think it simply happened because humans, as opportunistic hunters and scavengers, figured out that following wolves was a great way to get good fatty meat. Wolves constantly test ungulates by harrying them. Those that are healthy stand and fight. Those that are weak run. The wolves usually kill the weak ones. The healthy ones that stood to fight would have been easier targets for the spear, and the healthy ones are full of fat that our big brains need.
So we would have figured out that if we followed wolves we could get the good meat we needed to survive, and the wolves likely would have figured out that we were the ticket to getting an easier meal. We probably drove the wolves off the carcasses at first, but we probably left enough meat for the wolves get a lot of reward for their effort.
Further, reliance upon human societies would have allowed one wolf reproduction strategy to operate quite well. In wolf packs, a single mated pair does all the approved breeding. If another female gets pregnant, the main breeding female (sometimes called the alpha female) kills the puppies of the other female or steals them to add to her litter. Usually, this main breeding female comes in heat first, and her older puppies easily outcompete the other female’s pups.
But these females do get pregnant. That’s because on the outside of the pack territory, there are unpaired males roaming about. These females are usually the daughters of the main breeding pair, and because wolves have some inbreeding avoidance behavior and because their mother will beat them down if they try to mate with her mate, they will often try to mate with these unpaired males that roam outside the pack
One notable male wolf in Yellowstone, the so-called “Casanova,” wound up living most his life as an unpaired male that mated with these unpaired females. In the early days of the Yellowstone reintroduction, the main breeding females of several packs allowed these unpaired females to raise their litters. Prey was abundant and naïve, so there was no need to kill the pups of these females.
Keeping a single litter is a lot of work for a wolf pack, so there is a very strong need for the litters tying them down each year to be reduced to one or none. When you have more prey, these pressures are released.
It is very possible that humans provided a space for that Casanova strategy to work more often. Some of the first wolves that may have hooked up with humans on a more intimate basis could have been females that wanted to have their litters away from their murderous mothers, and humans could have felt empathy towards these female wolves, tossing them food and protecting them from predators while they raised their litters. Humans could have provided a space for wolves that bred this way to reproduce efficiently, and if you’re just mating with a male and not engaging in all the social suppression of estrus and litter culling and purloining behavior, genes can spread much more rapidly. Perhaps the wolves that had lessoned genetic tendency toward pair bonding behavior became the basis for the domestic dog, and these genes wound up swamping the entire population of wolves that became domestic dogs, which is why pair-bonding behavior is uncommon in most domestic dogs
So basing the domestication story upon a female wolf is pretty wise.
My other quibbles with the film have more to do with the depth of characterization. I never really got to know Alpha as a wolf or a dog or anything. She was just a straight-up heroic figure, but I didn’t find the whole process of her transforming from a predator that would hunt humans to an extremely dog-like wolf particularly believable. I also wanted better CGI of the cave lions and hyenas. I am a bit of a Pleistocene mammal nerd, and I really wanted more of them. But they are like phantasmal entities that lurk in as agents of death and nothing more. The writers did do quite a bit of homework on dog domestication, but I think they could have done more and pushed for an even more compelling narrative.
Finally, the “wolf” in the film is a Czechoslovakian vlcak, a breed of dog derived from Czechoslovakian working German shepherds and European wolves from the Carpathian Mountains. They were originally bred as an “improvement” to the working GSD of communist Czechoslovakia, but they never really got off the ground in that way. However, because they are mostly German shepherd and were selected hard for temperament, they are the most successful wolfdog breed ever produced. I do wonder, though, if people watching the film will realize that this breed is what was used to portray a wolf in the film. We are already going through a bit of a boomlet with Siberian huskies in North America, which is somewhat attributed to their wolfish features. If people do realize there is a breed of wolfdog that is recognized by many kennel clubs, then I can see this breed being mass-produced and sold to gullible people without much regard for temperament. This film gives the public this bit of information, then we could see lots of these dogs in shelters and pounds, which I’m sure no responsible breeders of vlcaks wants.
No, the performance of vlcaks in Alpha was not as compelling as Jed the wolfdog, but the public is now being exposed to this breed’s existence. It is something we need to think about very carefully.
I do give Alpha major props for trying to posit the origins of the dog within European hunter-gatherer societies and to give some credence to the Active Social Model for dog domestication, but in story-telling, I just couldn’t allow myself to follow that much artistic license with Keda’s miraculous escapes from danger.
Posted in dog domestication, wolves, tagged Canis familiaris, Canis lupus, Canis lupus familiaris, dog taxonomy on December 18, 2018|
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It’s not unusual for people who are trying to deny evolution or promote creationism or both, to come up with a common question:
“If evolution is true, then why don’t dogs have something that isn’t a dog every once in a while?”
This question would not be so much of a problem if we, who think we know better, would stop trying to create a species called Canis familiaris.
Canis familiaris made sense when we didn’t know what dogs were derived from, and it might have made sense if we thought there were hard and fast reproductive barriers between dogs and wolves.
[W]ithin the Old World clade, wolf and dog represent sister taxa. Therefore, suggestions that the dog or dingo are a separate species (Canis familiaris) (e.g., Crowther et al. 2014) would cause gray wolves to be a polyphetic taxon; and consequently, our results support dogs as a divergent subspecies of the wolf. This result has societal significance as legislation in some countries and regional governments consider wolves and dogs as distinct species restricting the possession, interbreeding, or the use of vaccines and medications in wolves or dog–wolf hybrids if they have only been approved for use in dogs. In this sense, analysis of evolutionary history informs law and veterinary practice, as dog lineages are nearly as distinct from one another as wolves are from dogs, and the justification for treating dogs and wolves differently is questionable.
The monophyly of the species is one thing that I think everyone should agree is worth preserving in any taxonomic system, but the genomes clearly show that if we create a special species for the dog or the dingo, we wreck the monophyly of Canis lupus.
I would also contend, perhaps a bit more controversially, that in light of a similar study of North American wolf-like canids’ genomes, that the coyote is also part of Canis lupus. This study found that gray wolves and coyotes have exchanged genes across North America and that gray wolves and coyotes last shared a common ancestor only around 50,000 years ago. That ancestor was probably an ancient Eurasian gray wolf that came into North America and evolved for a more generalist, jackal-like niche in the mid-latitudes of North America.
When someone claims that dogs are not wolves, they can only mean it in the same way that pugs are not Siberian huskies or that Great Danes are not dingoes. They are not wild Canis lupus, but they clearly are within that species, if we wish to keep the species monophyletic.
The reason why people want to claim a special species for the dog is because of Raymond Coppinger’s ideas still hold a lot of sway with people who wish to be learned about dogs. It’s not that everything that Coppinger said was wrong. It is what he was wrong about seems to be all that people know.
Coppinger argued that domestic dogs were obligate scavengers and thus must be placed as their own ecological species. An ecological species is the best argument for Canis familiaris. But it has limits for our understanding of evolution, and it can be turned into an absurd concept. For example, there are two sharp-tailed grouse subspecies that live in slightly different but adjacent habitat but do not readily interbreed. If we were to adhere to the same sort of species concept, then these two subspecies would have to be distinct species, even if it busted up the entire monophyly of the sharp-tailed grouse species.
Because the ecological species concept is muddled when comparing wolves to dogs and keeping an arbitrary Canis familiaris species destroys the monophyly of Canis lupus, it would make more sense to drop Canis familiaris entirely.
One could raise dogs to Canis lupus familiaris, but Raymond Pierotti and Brandy Fogg have argued in their book, called The First Domestication: How Wolves and Humans Coevolved, that there is no set of behavioral, physical, or physiological traits that define all dogs as a taxonomic entity. They instead argue that we should just call them “domestic Canis lupus,” in which they also group the dingo, which is “feral domestic Canis lupus.“
I remain agnostic about what we should call dogs, but Pierotti and Fogg’s quibbles are difficult to ignore. Perhaps we could have the subspecies for the dog, but there must be some acknowledgement that all we are doing is defining a domestic and feral population of a species.
If this blog post looks familiar, I wrote almost this exact same post in March, but I sometimes feel that I have to explain the very real scientific reasons why we don’t say that dogs are a unique species. It is not anti-science to do so, despite what Facebook dog experts tell you. If we want a monophyletic Canis lupus, then dogs have to be part of it.
Posted in dog domestication, wild dogs, wolves, tagged Arctic wolf, Ellesmere wolf, gray wolf, Greenland wolf on December 15, 2018|
Gordon Buchanan hanging out with fully wild wolf named Scruffy on Ellesmere Island. These Ellesmere wolves and those of Greenland were recently found to be a very genetically distinct population of North American wolf.
Long-time readers of this blog know that I am particularly fascinated by studies on wolf DNA, and I was surprised that I missed this little gem that came out in PLOS Genetics last month.
The authors used 40 genome sequences of gray wolves, Great Lakes wolves, proposed Eastern and red wolves, and coyotes. The authors found further evidence to show that red, Eastern, and Great Lakes wolves are various mixtures of coyotes and gray wolves. The paper also found that all gray wolves derived in North America do derive from a single ancestral population and thus represent a single monophyletic clade within Canis lupus.
The most interesting part of this paper though dealt with the genomes of wolves from the Queen Elizabeth Island, the famous arctic wolves, which are known for their white coats and curious nature around people.
The authors found that there were three distinct populations, which the authors define as East Arctic, West Arctic, and Polar. The first two had some evidence of admixture with mainland gray wolves, but the ones defined as “Polar” did not.
The wolves whose genomes came back that distinct were from Ellesmere and Greenland, which are the most northerly distributed of all North American wolves. The authors found that these wolves are relatively isolated from other wolf populations, and they do not have much genetic diversity.
These wolves have long fascinated me. They are curious and even socially open with people, and I think could give us a clue about how wolves could have hooked up with people in those Pleistocene days.
But the discovery that they really are a genetically distinct population is also of great interest. Even more, we have full genomes from these wolves now, and maybe we can do a comparison study of these curious wolves that have never been intensely persecuted by man, normal gray wolves, and domestic dogs. Maybe we can see what sorts of genes dogs and these polar wolves share that do not exist in other wolves, and maybe we could find out that my hypothesis is correct.
This hypothesis is the one that states that the original wolves of Eurasia behaved more like these polar wolves than the timid and fearful wolves of lower latitudes. If these polar wolves share genes associated with tameness that are also associated with domestic dogs and their general behavior, then we might see evidence some evidence that the original wolf of Eurasia would have had the temperament that could have led to domestication.
But that will have to wait for another paper, which I am waiting for.
Posted in dog domestication, wolves, tagged Active Social Domestication Model, Christoph Jung, Daniela Pörtl on December 4, 2018|
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Wolves and coyotes working as sled dogs in Ontario in 1923.
The world of dogs is full of ideas, and over the years, those ideas and their expositors have created several camps. I have learned to keep my head down in most of these discussions about dog ideology, and yes, I learned it the hard way. But I know there are several idea with which I will lay out my own views, or at least critique what I think is an error.
It is hard to overestimate the work of Raymond Coppinger in forming the main ideas around modern dog science. Coppinger was a biology professor at Massachusetts’s Hampshire College, and he proposed a particular dog domestication hypothesis. This is the model that lots of dog experts believe is correct, and this model also informs how they view the essential biology of dogs.
Coppinger’s domestication model relies heavily upon the work of a Soviet geneticist named Dmitri Belyaev. Belyaev was a Mendelian at the time of Lysenkoism, and he was banished a research facility in Novosibirsk, where he conducted domestication experiments upon silver-phase red foxes that were from fur farm populations. Belyaev selected for tameness using several criteria, and after so many generations, he produced foxes that had drop ears, less sexual dimorphism, large areas of white on their coats, curled tails, and even multiple estrus cycles per year.
This suite of features very strongly resembles the traits we see in domestic dogs, and Belyaev thought of his experiments as a sort of controlled analogy to dog domestication.
Coppinger took Belyaev’s ideas a bit further. Instead of seeing humans as actively domesticating wolves, Coppinger believed the whole process came from wolves scavenging near dumps near what became Neolithic settlements. These wolves evolved to become smaller and evolved smaller brains so they could live more easily on wastes, and these animals became the village dogs. Later, people would select for working and hunting behaviors in village, but dogs themselves were not domesticated for any purpose. They evolved from scavenging wolves.
The analogy that Coppinger saw in Belyaev is that he assumed that all wolves through all history had been the very timid paranoid wolves that are known in the lower latitudes of North America and Eurasia, and he thought that for wolves to become successful scavengers in such close proximity to humans that they would have undergone something similar to Belyaev’s selection. Those that were less afraid of humans would be more likely to stand in dumps while humans were nearby, eating more of the easily procured food.
When I first started this blog, you can see echoes of Coppinger in what I wrote on dog domestication. I loved his 2001 book, but as I’ve read more about wolves and new studies on dog cognition. I’ve come to doubt many of his ideas.
One of the biggest problems with Coppinger’s model is that the earliest dog remains that are not in contention as belonging to a dog are those of the Bonn-Oberkassel dog. It dates to 14,000 years ago in what is now Germany, and recent analysis showed that was actually a seven-month-old puppy that died of distemper. This dog existed in Europe thousands of years before the Neolithic cultural exchanges hit the region. That means the dog was created by hunter-gatherers of the Paleolithic, not in the Neolithic middens.
The other problem I have with Coppinger’s model is the assumption that all wolves through history are these fearful and often paranoid wolves that exist in much of North America and Eurasia. However, when one reads accounts of early explorers and settlers to North America, there are many accounts of curious and often socially open wolves approaching humans. Lewis and Clark’s diaries tell of luring a wolf in very close with a piece of meat and then killing it with a spear, and various other authors talk of wolves living very near native people’s camps and settlements, often crossing with the dogs. It is likely that our widespread persecution of wolves has culled out all this curiosity and tolerance of people in most extant wolves. Through our hunting, trapping, and poisoning campaigns, we have selected for wolves that are timid and shy, if not totally paranoid.
Further, we have wolves on Ellesmere and Baffin Island that have never been extensively hunted by humans, and these wolves are quite curious and tolerant of humans. (See Jim Brandenburg’s “White Wolf” and Gordon Buchanan’s “Snow Wolf Family and Me” to get an idea of how tolerant and curious these wolves are.) These wolves, though certainly adapted for life in polar conditions, are potentially a good model for what the original wolves of Eurasia were like when they first encountered our species. They were likely quite curious and socially tolerant as these wolves are, and it would have been easy for hunter-gatherers to form a relationship with them.
Several attempts to counter some of Copponger’s shortcomings have come to the fore in recent years. Darcy Morey and Rujana Jeger have posited shifting trophic strategies between wolves and hunter-gatherers, such that dogs evolved from wolves in hunter-gatherer societies and became apex predators with people, later becoming apex consumers with humans in the Holocene. Raymond Pierotti and Brandy Fogg have made a similar attempt in their First Domestication: How Humans and Wolves Coevolved. These two authors rely heavily upon ethnography of hunter-gatherer peoples or partially hunter-gatherer peoples and their complex relationship with hunting dogs and wolves. The authors contend that these societies have the best framework for understanding how wolves might have been domesticated within a hunting symbiosis.
Recently, though, I came across a new model, one that offers a critique of Coppinger and encapsulates many of the ideas of Morey and Jeger and Pierotti and Fogg. It also posits a new theory of dog domestication called the Active Social Model of dog domestication.
The authors of this model are Christoph Jung and Daniela Pörtl, and they posit a model that sees wolves and people in the late Pleistocene operating as predators that often worked together and showed each other some mutual respect. In this model, emotional bonds that existed between wolves and people were a major driving force behind the domestication of dogs, and this is the missing piece that explains why wolves were domesticated. Foxes, jackals, and hyenas have all been noted as scavenging near human settlements, but they have never attempted to form emotional bonds with people, unlike the aforementioned wolves of Ellesmere.
I really like this model, because it actually does mention many things I’ve discussed on this blog. It allows for the less-than-timid, more socially open wolves of the High Arctic as a better model for Pleistocene wolf behavior than those from other more persecuted populations. It also allows for the concept of a potential hunting partnership between wolves and humans as the catalyst for domestication.
As I noted before, I think the way humans capitalized upon wolves as hunting partners is that humans figured out that a very good way to kill fat healthy game was to follow wolves. Wolves constantly test game. If the quarry runs, it is usually unhealthy and will be easily run down, so the wolves’ instinct is to give chase. If game is healthy, it will stand and fight the wolves.
The stand and fight behavior would give ancient hunter-gatherers a relatively stationary target for their spears, so wolves and humans learned that they could both easily bring down healthy prey if they made it stand and fight.
It is precisely how elkhounds, Karelian bear dogs, and big game laiki bay up moose and wild boar for the rifle shot. The only difference is these dogs bark while the prey stands at bay.
Humans are big-brained, and our nutritional needs when living on a meat-based diet require quite a bit of fat. Being able to kill healthy prey in this way was a great way to get the fat we needed to power our large brains.
And it would have been to our advantage to hook up with wolves, and wolves would have had an easier job getting meat. They wouldn’t have to grapple so much with big dangerous prey. Our spears would do much of the work, and they would get some meat for their troubles.
This new active social domestication model allows for this sort of relationship to have been the process whereby humans and wolves hooked up. This relationship is far beyond the simple scavenger at the dump. Wolves were not the trash pandas of the Pleistocene. Instead, we had humans and wolves interacting with each other, and over time, these interactions led to the development of the dog.
Man originated in Africa. The whole lineage of apes from which we and all the other human species descended was in Africa, a sister lineage to the apes that gave us the chimpanzee and the bonobo.
But man’s first domestic animal was not of Africa at all. The large pack-hunting wolf roamed the great expanses of Eurasia, and it was only when certain Eurasian hunters began to incorporate wolves into their societies that we began the process of domestication.
For nearly two million years, human ancestors and the ancestors of the wild dog lived throughout Africa. There was never an attempt to bring these dogs to heel, and there was never attempt to reach out to that species.
The question remains of why African wild dogs were never domesticated, and part of the answer lies in their nervous nature. I am reminded of Martin Clunes’s A Man and His Dogs. Clunes ended his two part documentary with a visit to Tony Fitzjohn’s African wild dog project, and at one point, Clunes is asked to pick up a tranquilized African wild dog, while making certain that the jaws are positioned well away from his body. These dogs react and react quickly.
These dogs live as quite persecuted mesopredators in an intact African ecosystem that includes lions and spotted hyenas. Yes, this animal that kills large game with a greater success rate than any other African predator is totally the underdog in a land so dominated by the great maned cat and the spotted bone-crusher.
Their lives must be spent hunting down quarry and then bolting down meat as fast as they can before the big predators show up to steal it.
The current thinking is the first African wild dog ancestor to appear in Africa was Lycaon sekowei. This species lived in Africa from 1.9 to 1 million years ago, which is roughly the same time frame in which the first human ancestors began to consume meat readily. It was very likely that a major source of meat consumed by these ancestors came from scavenging. Homo habilis has been des cribed as a very serious scavenger, as was Homo erectus.
Both Homo habilis and erectus were contemporaries of Lycaon sekowei, and one really thinks about it, these early humans would have been very interested in the comings and goings of the great predators. Of all the predators to drive off kills, it is obvious that a pack of wild dogs would be easier to drive off than just about any other predators that were evident in Africa at the time.
So for at least 1.9 million years, African wild dogs evolved knowing that humans of any sort were bad news. They may have inherited an instinct towards antipathy toward humans, and thus, there never was any chance for us to develop relationships such as those that have been observed with wolves and hunter-gatherer people.
I think this played a a much bigger role in reason why man never tried to domesticate African wild dogs. One should also keep in mind that wolves in Eurasia were also mesopredators in that ecosystem. Darcy Morey and Rujana Jeger point out that Pleistocene wolves functioned as mesopredators in which their numbers were likely limited by cave lions, archaic spotted hyenas, and various forms of machariodont. They were probably under as much competition from these predators as the ancestral African wild dogs were under from the guild of super predators on their continent.
What was different, though, is the ancestral wolves never evolved in an enviroment which scavenging from various human species was a constant threat, so they could develop behaviors towards humans that were not always characterized by extreme caution and fear.
We were just novel enough for wolves to consider us something other than nasty scavengers, and thus, we could have the ability to develop a hunting symbiosis as is described in Mark Derr’s book and also Pierotti and Fogg’s.
It should also be noted that African wild dogs do not have flexible societies. In wolf societies, there are wolves that manage to reproduce without forming a pair bond, simply because when prey is abundant, it is possible for wolves other than the main breeding female to whelp and rear puppies. These females have no established mates, and they breed with male wolves that have left their natal packs and live on the edges of the territories of established packs. In the early years of the Yellowstone reintroduction, many packs let these females raise their pups that were sired by the wanderers, and one famous wolf (302M) wound up doing this most of his life, siring many, many puppies. I think that what humans did in their initial relationships with wolves was to allow more wolves to reproduce in this fashion, which opens up the door for more selective breeding than one would get from wolves that are more pair-bonded.
In African wild dogs, one female has the pups. If another female has puppies, hers are confiscated by the main breeding female and usually starve to death.
The wolf had the right social flexibility and the right natural history for humans form relationships with them, which the African wild dog was lacking.
I have not yet been asked to review the new film Alpha, which is a story about early dog domestication. I have not seen the film yet, but I do want to see it.
I do think we need to get beyond the Coppinger model for dog domestication, and I think there have been some serious attempts recently, but I’m not going to play around with that right now.
Instead, I’m going play around with some speculative domestication reverie. Forgive me my flights of fancy. I must play around a bit.
Let’s say that domestication didn’t involve wolves at all. Let’s say it happened with a very different canid.
And you really can’t get more different from wolves than bat-eared foxes are. Bat-eared foxes are odd little creatures. They are intensely social foxes that live almost entirely upon harvester termites. They do eat other things, and they have even been known to scavenge carrion. But most of what they eat is harvester termites.
Let’s say that somewhere in East Africa some 50,000 years ago, a wandering band of nomad came into the land, but found the whole countryside devoid of game. The only quadruped messing about the scene were several bands of bat-eared foxes.
And the hunters speared the foxes and ran them down and roasted their bodies on campfires and ate away at their manky fox flesh and hoped the spirits would bring forth a kudu or an impala from the bush.
So for many weeks, the people hunted the bat-eared foxes, and they choked down the fox meat.
But then the fox numbers dwindled, and the disgusting pains of hunger swept through the people. And the babies starved to death, and the children grew gaunt in the piercing sun.
And so the hunters set out on a big journey into the rising sun hoping that they would some place so wondrous as to have plentiful hoofed game.
One hunter, though, knew of a little trick that he’d learned from the hot days of fox chasing in the sun. He knew that the bat-eared foxes like to hang near the termite nests, and he knew that if he staked out one big termite nest, he’d eventually run into a fox.
For two hot days he sat in silence. But on the nightfall of that second day, he the hoary gray form of a bat-eared fox. It was a vixen, and she was all heavy with milk.
Her form was gaunt and tight, and he teats were all swollen with the milk. And the hunter felt pity for her, and so he could not cast his spear upon her.
He sat there watching as she picked up the termites and marveled her rapid mastication. Rare is the hunter who can avoid watching his quarry and empathizing with it. It is man’s ability to empathize with an animal that ultimately makes him great hunter. It is his ability enter into the animal’s mind and see its ways and its habits as the animal sees it.
But he still can kill it and kill it with skill. It’s just that every once in a while, the empathy subsumes the hunter, and he feels that odd profound kinship with the animal. It is a feeling I have felt so profoundly on my own hunts, and it is one that I know has made me pass up more than a few shots. And these are the feelings I do not wish to lose. If I do, I will be a monster, not a fully human hunter.
So the hunter sat and watched the vixen eating the termites, and he let her pass. He then followed her tracks through the arid country. He kept his distance back on the trail, hoping that he would not spook her.
He followed her out of nothing more than curiosity, and as he followed her, he noticed the cloven hoofs of a kudu. The fox and the kudu were following the same trail, so the hunter knew that if he tired of his little fox tracking, he might be able to get on a kudu trail and bring home some nice meat for the band.
As he followed the trail, the kudu sign grew fresher and fresher. And out of the bush, a young kudu materialized out of the heat waves. Both hunter and kudu were suprised to encounter each other, but the hunter knew to throw his spear. It hit home, and the kudu ran and ran. The hunter followed its blood trail, and then found the beast lying in its death throes.
He dispatched the kudu with a simple blow to the head, and it became meat in very short order.
The hunter covered his kill and began the journey back to where he had left his companions. He had dropped a kudu bull, and they would soon have food to eat.
But he had to make his way carefully home, for the stench of blood could bring in lions and hyenas. So he started homeward, when he sensed presence of another being staring at him.
When he turned to look for his stalker, he was shocked to find the vixen standing upon a little boulder. She was transfixed by him, and he was amazed by her.
He turned to walk away, and the bat-eared fox squall-barked. He turned to look in her direction. He waved a blessing at her, and then turned to walk again. The vixen squall-barked again, this time with frantic intent.
The hunter turned to look at the fox, but then another movement caught his eye, He turned his head to make his eyes register upon the form before him, and then he realized that a young male lion had come to stalk him. It had been trailing the wounded kudu, and now, it had come upon a bit of human flesh. All it had to do was lie in wait, and there would be a kill.
The hunter stood tall on his legs and reached for his spear. He had but one opportunity to make the lion fall as it began to charge, and he knew that he had to make it count. Otherwise, he would be lion’s meat.
He made his spear aim dead on the lion, and as the beast began its horrific charge, the hunter steeled his nerves and began his spear cast. It home just as the lion’s charge reached within ten feet of him. The arrow hit the lion lungs, and her ran off in terror to die the death of a mortally wounded beast.
But the hunter lived. And he owed his survival to the little squall-barks of the bat-eared vixen.
He just began to make his way home when he herd the sound of many hoof-beats. All around him were vast herd of zebra and wildebeest. And there were many kudu and impala flitting about.
In his journey following the bat-eared fox, he had accidentally stumbled onto some game rich country, and he had to bring his people here.
And he had to make them thank the fox.
And so these people survived a long bout of famine all thanks to their guardian spirit, a little bat-eared fox.
And so the legend was passed through all the people’s children and their children and their children’s children. And the people came to revere the fox, and bring the kits into their villages and make them their guardians and good luck talismans.
And soon there were whole populations of bat-eared fox that lived in villages and ate people food along with their normal insectivory.
And they followed the people out of Africa into Eurasia, where they diversified into so many forms.
And the bat-eared fox is found on every island and on every continent where people exist.
Some herd our chickens and ducks. Others keep malaria mosquitoes at bay, while others rat as proper terriers do in our present reality.
But in this reality, man’s best friend is the bat-eared fox, not the domesticated wolf. And wolves themselves never survived into the present era. It was too clunky and too churlish to fit into the world dominated by man, and it was fully extirpated from all the land.
And so I’ve laid out some silly reverie of speculative domestication. Forgive me my folly. I sometimes can’t help it.
Original crossbreeding between a German shepherd and Carpathian wolf to found the Czechoslovakian Vlcak.
If you have been reading this blog for a long time, I used to post historical and indigenous accounts of wolves, coyotes, and dingoes being used as working animals. I also would post accounts different breeders of domestic dogs crossing their stock with wolves to improve their strains.
I have long been critical of the Raymond Coppinger model of dog domestication, which posits that wolves scavenging from Neolithic dumps created the dog as an obligate scavenger that then became selectively bred for human uses. In this model, the tropical village dog is the ancestral form of all canines, a position that has emboldened the “Dogs are not wolves” theorists to suggest some tropical Asian Canis x is the actual ancestor of the domestic dog.
This model also posits that all dogs are just obligate scavengers, and unfortunately, this obligate scavenger designation means that what could be otherwise good books and research on dogs essentially denies their predatory behavior.
Last year, I kept hearing about a book that took on Coppinger’s model head-on. This book took Coppinger’s task for having distinct Eurocentric biases and that Coppinger essentially ignored vast amounts anthropological data on how different human societies relate to wild and semi-domestic canids.
So I finally ordered a copy of this book, which is called The First Domestication: How Wolves and Humans Coevolved by Raymond Pierotti and Brandy Fogg. I do recommend this book, but I readily admit that I don’t agree with quite a bit of it. I agree with it more than Coppinger, though, because they rather clearly show massive holes in Coppinger’s model.
Pierotti and Fogg have produced a model that relies heavily upon humans and wolves encountering and then benefiting from a hunting mutualism. Humans have a long history as scavengers, and even today, there are people who follow large predators, including lions, to rob them of their kills. Dholes are targeted by certain people as well, and it is very likely that humans entering Eurasia would have done the same with wolves.
The difference between the lions and the dholes and ancient wolves is that the lions and dholes resent having humans come near their kills. The ancient wolves, however, came to work with people to bring down more prey. These wolves and humans came to be the dominant predators in Eurasia.
Pierotti and Fogg’s model posits the domestication process as beginning with ancient hunter-gather societies. It relies upon the wolf’s predatory nature as an important catalyst in allowing this partnership to thrive.
Further, the authors are rather clear in that our Eurocentric understanding of a clear delineation between wolves and dogs is a rather recent creation. Most cultures who have existed where there are wolves and dogs have a much more plastic understanding of the differences that separate the two or they have no separation of all.
The most compelling analogies in the work are the discussions about the relationships among hunters in Siberia, their laikas, and wild wolves and the relationships between indigenous Australians and dingoes.
In the Siberian laika culture, the dogs have extensively exchanged genes with wild wolves, enough that laikas and wolves do share mitochondrial DNA haplotypes. The laikas (or laiki, as they are known in Russia) do hunt the sable and other small game. They also protect the camps from bears, and in some areas, the laikas are used as not particularly specialized livestock guardian dogs. The authors see these dogs a very good analogy to describe how the earliest people and dogs would have lived. These dogs would have been cultured to humans, but they would still be getting an influx of wild genes as they lived in the wild.
In the dingo example, the authors discuss how these hunter-gather cultures would keep dingo pups and treat them almost exactly as we would our own domestic dogs. They also would use the dingoes to hunt kangaroos, but during mating season, they would allow their companions to leave the camps or stay. They often would leave, but some would go off for a time in the bush and return. This suggests that early humans might not have forced their socialized wolves to stay in camp and that relationship could have been a lot more libertarian than we might have assumed.
These relationships are very different from the scavenging village dogs that Coppinger contends were like the original dogs. These animals are not obligate scavengers. They are hunters, and what’s more, it is their hunting prowess that makes the relationship work.
Further, the authors make a convincing argument that we can no longer use the scientific name Canis familiaris, because many cultures have relied upon wolf-like dogs and dog-like wolves for survival. These animals are virtually impossible to distinguish from each other, and therefore, it would make sense that we would have to allow dogs to be part of Canis lupus.
The authors contend, though I think rather weakly, that dogs derive from multiple domestication events from different wolves. I remain fully agnostic to this question, but I will say that full-genome comparisons of wolves and three dogs that represent three distinct dog lineages suggest that dogs represent a clade. They are still very closely related to extant Canis lupus, especially Eurasian ones, and still must be regarded as part of Canis lupus. Therefore, one does not need multiple origins for domestic dogs from wolves to make the case that they are a subspecies of Canis lupus.
I am, however, quite glad to see that the authors reject this Canis familiaris classification, even if I think the reasoning is better explained through an analysis that shows how dogs fit within a clade called Canis lupus than one that relies upon multiple origins.
I really have no problem thinking of coyotes as being a form of Canis lupus in that a pug is a form of Canis lupus. All the acceptance of this classification does is allow for a positing that this species Canis lupus has thrived because it possesses both phenotypical and behavioral plasticity.
The authors, however, would have a problem with my classification. They make regular reference to red wolves, which have clearly been shown to be hybrids between coyotes and wolves, which themselves are probably better regarded as divergent forms of a phenotypically plastic species. They also contend that coyotes and people have never formed relationships like people have formed with wolves, because coyotes are too aggressive.
But that said, I think the authors have clearly shown in their text that dogs and wolves are part of the same species.
The authors also make some controversial arguments about dog paleontology and archaeology. One argument they rely upon heavily is that wolves could have become behaviorally very much like dogs without developing all the morphological changes that are associated with most domestic dogs. Some merit certainly does exist with these arguments, but it also puts paleontology and archaeology in a position that makes it impossible to tell if a wolf-like canid found near human camps is a truly wild animal or creature on its way to domestication.
This argument does have some merit, but it still will have problems in those fields of study, because it becomes impossible to tell semi-domesticated wolves from wild ones in the fossil and subfossil record.
However, the authors do make a good case, which I have also made, that argues that the original wolf population had no reason to show fear or aggression towards people. The best analogous population of wolves to these original ones are those found on the Queen Elizabeth Islands of Northern Canada. These large arctic wolves have never experienced persecution, so they are quite curious and tolerant of the humans they encounter. Wolves like these could have easily been the basis for a mutualism that would eventually lead to domestication.
The authors also contend that the reason wolves in Europe are reviled is the result of the Western church’s propaganda that was working against traditional totemic animals of the pagans. Wolves were among those totems, and the church taught that wolves were of the devil.
However, I think this argument is a bit faulty, because Europeans are not the only people who hate wolves. Many pastoralist people in Asia are not big fans of wolves, and their hatred of wolves has nothing to do with the church. The traditional religions of the Navajo and Hopi also do not hold the wolf in very high regard, and these two cultures have been in the sheep business for centuries.
Further, we have very well-documented cases of wolves hunting and killing people in Europe. These wolf attacks were a major problem in France, where notorious man-eating wolves were often named, and they were not unknown in other parts of Europe as well.
The authors focus heavily on the benign relationship between wolves and people, including the wolf that hunted bison calves and deer to feed survivors of the Sand Creek Massacre, but they ignore the stories that do not posit the wolf in a good light.
The reason wolves in Eurasia have sometimes taking to hunting people is really quite simple: Eurasia is a land where people focused much more on domesticating species to create animal agriculture. Agriculture has a tendency to reduce biodiversity in a region, and when people kill off all the deer in an area to make room for sheep, the wolves turn to hunting sheep. If you live in a society in which people do not have ready access to weapons, then the wolves start targeting people. Feudal societies in Europe would have been open target for wolves living in such ecosystems. By contrast, the indigenous people of North America, did not domesticate hoofed animals for agriculture. Instead, they managed the land, often with the use of fire, to create biodiversity of which they could hunt.
The authors do show that dogs and wolves are intricately linked animals. They show that dogs and wolves are the same species. They use many wonderful anecdotes of captive wolves and wolfdogs to make their case, and in making this case, they have made the case clear that dogs are the produce of hunter-gatherer societies and still are conspecific with the wolf.
I do, however, have some quibbles with some of the sources they use in the text. For example, when they discuss Queen Elizabeth Islands wolves, they focus on an account of Elizabeth Marshall Thomas on Baffin Island. She was on Baffin Island for one summer and observed one wolf pack. She is a fine observer of animals, but much of her analysis about dog and wolf behavior is still controversial. The authors also regularly make reference to Cesar Millan as a dog expert, when virtually no credentialed dog behavior expert thinks he is, and to the notorious dogsbite.org website, which is of even more contentious. These authors are making serious and well-reasoned arguments about dog and wolf behavior and relying upon these sources detracted from the work. I would have liked if they had referred to L. David Mech’s wolf observations on Ellesmere or to John Bradshaw as an expert on dog behavior.
I also had some issues with their contention that the Ainu people of Japan are Turkic or Altaic. No one knows exactly who these people are, but they are interesting in their relationship with wolves. Traditional Japanese society, distinct from the Ainu, was actually quite similar to the Siberian cultures that have produced laika dogs that still interbreed with wolves. However, I don’t think anyone still thinks that the Ainu are Turkic or Altaic.
Finally, the authors do make a good case against Coppinger’s model, but they go on to accept Coppinger’s fixed motor pattern dependence model to describe breed specialization. It is certainly true that Coppinger was Eurocentric in his understanding of dog domestication, but both Coppinger and the authors are Anglocentric in their understanding of dog hunting and herding behavior. The authors think this is Coppinger’s strongest argument. I think this is among his weakest. This model states that pointing, herding, and retrieving are all just arrested development of a full predatory sequence. A dog that can point just stalks. It never learns to use its jaws to kill. A border collie stalks but also engages is a type of chasing behavior. It will also never learn to kill. A retriever will run out and grab, but it lacks the killing bite.
The biggest problem with this model is that everyone knows of border collies that have learned to hunt, kill, and eat sheep. I had a hard-driven golden retriever that would retrieve all day, but she would kill rabbits and even fawns.
The Anglo-American concept of specialized gun dogs affected Coppinger’s understanding of their behavior. He never really looked into continental HPRs. For example, Deutsch-Drathaars, the original German variant of the German wirehair, are bred to retrieve, point, track, and dispatch game. Such an animal makes no sense in this model, for it would suggests that an animal that would point would only ever be stuck in that stalking behavior. It would never be able to retrieve, and it certainly would never use its jaws to kill.
A better model says that dogs are born with a tendency to show behaviors, such as exaggerated stalking behavior that can be turned into pointing through training. There are countless stories of pointing dogs that suddenly lost their pointing behavior after running with hard-driving flushing dog. The dog may have been born with that exaggerated stalking behavior, but the behavior was lost when it entered into social interaction. Indeed, much of these specialized hunting behaviors are developed through training, so that what actually happens is the dog’s motor patterns are refined through training rather than being solely the result of being arrested in full. This is why all the old retriever books from England tell the sportsman never to allow his dog to go ratting. As soon as that dog learns to use its jaws to kill, it is very likely that this dog will start using its jaws on the game it is sent to retrieve.
Despite my quibbles and reservations, Pierotti and Fogg have made a convincing case for the hunting mutualism between wolves and humans as the basis for the domestication of dogs. I was particularly impressed with their use of ethnography and non-Western histories to make their case. I do recommend this book for a good case that we do need a new model for dog domestication, and the questions they raise about taxonomy should be within our field of discussion.
We think of interactions between predators as always antagonistic. Meat is hard to come by, and if one comes by meat on the hoof, it is unlikely that the owner-operator of said flesh will give it up willingly. Meat is a prized food source, and it is little wonder that most predators spend quite a bit of energy driving out competitors from hunting grounds.
Because of this antagonism, the domestication of wolves by ancient hunter-gatherers is difficult to explain. Indeed, the general way of getting wolves associated with people is see them as scavengers that gradually evolved to fear our species less.
This idea is pretty heavily promoted in the dog domestication literature, for it is difficult for experts to see how wolves could have been brought into the human fold any other way.
But there are still writers out there who posit a somewhat different course for dog domestication. Their main contentions are that scavengers don’t typically endear themselves to those from which they are robbing, and further, the hunter-gatherers of the Pleistocene did not produce enough waste to maintain a scavenging population of wolves.
It is virtually impossible to recreate the conditions in which some wolves hooked up with people. With the exception of those living on the some the Queen Elizabeth Islands, every extant wolf population has been persecuted heavily by man. Wolves generally avoid people, and there has been a selection pressure through our centuries of heavy hunting for wolves to have extreme fear and reactivity. It is unlikely that the wolves that were first encountered on the Mammoth Steppe were shy and retiring creatures. They would have been like the unpersecuted wolves of Ellesmere, often approaching humans with bold curiosity.
As I have noted in an earlier post, those Ellesmere wolves are an important population that have important clues to how dog domestication might have happened, but the truth of the matter is that no analogous population of wolves or other wild canids exists in which cooperation with humans is a major part of the survival strategy. The wolves on Ellesmere are not fed by anyone, but they don’t rely upon people for anything.
But they are still curious about our species, and their behavior is so tantalizing. Yet it is missing that cooperative analogy that might help us understand more.
I’ve searched the literature for this analogy. I’ve come up short every time. The much-celebrated cooperation between American badgers and coyotes is still quite controversial, and most experts now don’t believe the two species cooperate. Instead, they think the badger goes digging for ground squirrels, and the coyote stand outside the burrow entrance waiting for the prey to bolt out as the badger’s digging approaches its innermost hiding place in the den. The coyote gets the squirrel, and the badger wastes energy on its digging.
But there is a story that is hard to dispute. It has only been recorded once, but it is so tantalizing that I cannot ignore it.
Both of these species do engage in cooperative hunting behavior. Black-backed jackals often work together to hunt gazelles and other small antelope, and they are well-known to work together to kill Cape fur seal pups on Namibia’s Skeleton Coast. Male cheetahs form coalitions that work together to defend territory and to hunt cooperatively.
However, the two species generally have a hostile relationship. Cheetahs do occasionally prey upon black-backed jackals, and black-backed jackals will often mob a cheetah after it has made a kill, in hopes of forcing the cat to abandon all that meat.
So these animals usually cannot stand each other, and their interactions are not roseate in the least. Eaton described the “normal interaction” as follows:
The normal interaction between these two predators occurs when the jackals hunt in the late afternoon and come into a group of cheetahs. The jackals, often four or five, are normally spread out over several hundred yards and maintain contact by barking as they move. When cheetahs are encountered by one of the jackals, it barks to the others and they all come to the cheetahs, sniffing the air as they approach apparently looking for a kill. If the cheetahs are not on a kill, the jackals search the immediate area looking for a carcass that might have just been left by the cheetahs. If nothing is found, they remain near the cheetahs for some time, following them as they move ; and when a kill is made the jackals feed on the leftover carcass. If the cheetahs have already fed and are inactive and if a carcass is not found nearby, the jackals move on.
However, Eaton discovered that one particular group of jackals and one female cheetah had developed a different strategy:
At the time I was there in November, 1966, one area of the park was often frequented by a female cheetah with four cubs and was also the territory of a pair of jackals with three pups. The jackal young remained at the den while the adults hunted either singly or together. Upon encountering the cheetah family, the jackals approached to about 20 yards and barked but were ignored except for an occasional chase by the cubs. The jackals ran back and forth barking between the cheetahs and a herd of Grant’s gazelles (Gazella granti) feeding nearby. The two jackals had gone on to hunt and were almost out of sight by the time the adult cheetah attacked two male Grant’s gazelles that had grazed away from the herd. The hunt was not successful. The jackals took notice of the chase and returned to look for a kill ; it appeared that they associated food with the presence of the cheetahs and perhaps with the chase.
One month later, while observing the same cheetah family, I noticed that the entire jackal family was hunting as a group. The cheetah and her cubs were about 300 yards from a herd of mixed species. This same herd had earlier spotted the cheetahs and given alarm calls. The adult cheetah was too far away for an attack,there was little or no stalking cover and the herd was aware of her presence. The cheetahs had been lying in the shade for about one-half an hour since the herd spotted them when the jackals arrived. Upon discovering the cheetahs lying under an Acacia tree, one of the adult jackals barked until the others were congregated around the cheetah family. The jackal that had found the cheetahs crawled to within ten feet of the adult cheetah which did not respond. The jackal then stood up and made a very pneumatic sound by forcing air out of the lungs in short staccato bursts. This same jackal turned towards the game herd, ran to it and, upon reaching it, ran back and forth barking. The individuals of the herd watched the jackal intently. The cheetah sat up and watched the herd as soon as it became preoccupied with the activity of the jackal. Then the cheetah quickly got up and ran at half-speed toward the herd, getting to within 100 yards before being seen by the herd. The prey animals then took flight while the cheetah pursued an impala at full speed.
Upon catching the impala and making the kill, the cheetah called to its cubs to come and eat. After the cheetahs had eaten their fill and moved away from the carcass, the waiting jackals then fed on the remains.
Eaton made several observations of this jackal family working with this female cheetah, and by his calculations, the cheetah was twice as successful when the jackals harassed the herds to aid her stalk.
Eaton made note of this behavior and speculated that this sort of cooperative hunting could have been what facilitated dog domestication:
If cheetah and jackal can learn to hunt mutually then it is to be expected that man’s presence for hundreds, of thousands of years in areas with scavenging canines would have led to cooperative hunting between the two. In fact, it is hard to believe otherwise. It is equally possible that it was man who scavenged the canid and thereby established a symbiosis. Perhaps this symbiosis facilitated the learning of effective social hunting by hominids. Selection may have favored just such an inter-specific cooperation.
Agriculture probably ended the importance of hunting as the binding force between man and dog and sponsored the more intensive artificial selection of breeds for various uses. It is possible that until this period men lived closely with canids that in fossil form are indistinguishable from wild stock (Zeuner, 1954).
Domestication may have occurred through both hunting symbiosis and agricultural life; however, a hunting relationship probably led to the first domestication. Fossil evidence may eventually reconstruct behavioral associations between early man and canids.
Wolves are much more social and much more skilled as cooperative hunters than black-backed jackals are. Humans have a complex language and a culture through which techniques and technology can be passed from generation to generation.
So it is possible that a hunting relationship between man and wolf in the Paleolithic could have been maintained over many generations.
The cheetah had no way of teaching her cubs to let the jackals aid their stalks, and one family of jackals is just not enough to create a population of cheetah assistants.
But humans and these unpersecuted Eurasian wolves of the Pleistocene certainly could create these conditions.
I imagine that the earliest wolf-assisted hunts went much like these jackal-cheetah hunts. Wolves are always testing prey to assess weakness. If a large deer species or wild horse is not weak, it will stand and confront the wolves, and in doing so, it would be exposing itself to a spear being thrown in its direction.
If you’ve ever tried a low-carbohydrate diet, you will know that your body will crave fat. Our brains require quite a bit of caloric intake from fat to keep us going, which is one of those very real costs of having such a large brain. Killing ungulates that stood to fight off wolves meant that would target healthy animals in the herds, and healthy animals have more fat for our big brains.
Thus, working together with wolves would give those humans an advantage, and the wolves would be able to get meat with less effort.
So maybe working together with these Ellesmere-like wolves that lived in Eurasia during the Paleolithic made us both more effective predators, and unlike with the cheetah and the black-backed jackals, human intelligence, language, and cultural transmission allowed this cooperation to go on over generations.
Eaton may have stumbled onto the secret of dog domestication. It takes more than the odd population of scavenging canids to lay the foundations for this unusual domestication. Human agency and foresight joined with the simple cooperative nature of the beasts to make it happen.
