Dog Sense (10 page)

Village dogs

The most likely scenario is that wolves were domesticated at several different locations, possibly across Asia, including the Middle East, although one or more additional European origins also seem plausible. Taken at face value, the archaeological evidence points to at least one early origin in the Fertile Crescent, and this is the preferred scenario of some of the DNA experts. However, one interpretation of the DNA points to the earliest domestication as occurring in South China, where far less archaeological investigation has taken place. Each of the teams of DNA experts has their own samples of dogs and wolves, and so far these have led them to different conclusions. Their accounts are not easy to reconcile at present, but the most likely conclusion is that there
was no single point of origin but, rather, that wolves entered human society at several far-flung locations across Asia and Europe. Some left few or no descendants; others prospered and eventually interbred as humans began to take dogs with them as they traveled.

Although we still do not know where, exactly, the dog originated, it is clear that our modern dogs do not trace their ancestry back to any one particular kind of wolf. Dogs are the result of a mixing of many different kinds of wolves from across Asia and Europe; the only wolf that is definitely missing from the recipe is the American timber wolf. Thus there is no wolf alive today that can act as the perfect model for understanding dogs and the way they behave. Moreover, the long period over which domestication occurred means that dogs have had the opportunity to change radically since they became separate from wolves, ten thousand or more generations ago. During the same period their environment, too, has undergone a considerable transformation.

The dog's evolution did not occur all at once, and the forces driving it have themselves altered over the dog's long period of coexistence with man. Indeed, over the same span of many thousands of years, we have changed almost as much as dogs have. The dog's history is bound up in our transition from hunter-gatherer to modern city-dweller, and its roles have changed during that time as well. Unlike that of some other species, the domestication of the dog has served more than just a single purpose. Dogs have fulfilled many functions within human society, and so the story of their domestication is necessarily complex: a series of steps without a coherent underlying plan, but each one significant to our understanding of the dogs we have today.

Unfortunately, the early stages of the dog's domestication occurred so long ago that we know little of how they occurred. Given that the dog was the first domestic animal of all, deliberate domestication seems farfetched anyway—where, after all, would such a radical idea have come from? The most likely scenario is that associations between man and wolf appeared spontaneously, in several places, over thousands of years, long before the archaeological record shows any dogs that were distinct from wolves in appearance. Many of these associations would have died out, perhaps as environmental conditions or human customs changed.
Others—probably only a small minority—lasted long enough for the “village wolves” to turn themselves into the prototypes for domestic dogs. The “village wolf” would have looked so much like a wild wolf that the two would be indistinguishable in the archaeological record.

Despite the difficulties of understanding the process by which dogs became domesticated, we can gain some insight by studying the process in other animals, where the evidence is more detailed and better preserved because domestication occurred later. The history of the pig is one instructive example. Our modern domestic pigs are descended from the wild boar: While the archaeological record points to a single domestication in Turkey, the DNA indicates six other domestications, each independent of the next and stemming from a different population of boars. Did seven different civilizations each domesticate the pig independently of one other, or did one think of it first, after which the idea of domesticating pigs spread from one area to another, each turning to its local population of wild boars for the raw material? It turns out that this is the wrong question, because both alternatives are based on the concept that domestication is a deliberate and cumulative process.

The first few domestications appear, with the benefit of hindsight, to have been haphazard affairs, progressing in fits and starts and occasionally going into reverse. This scenario certainly applies to the domestic pig. More than two thousand years elapsed between the first pigs that were distinguishable from wild boars and the pigs that showed clear evidence of being farmed (e.g., a high adult female-to-male ratio, since culling of males when they are young maximizes productivity). That it took nearly a hundred generations of humans to accomplish a single domestication doesn't suggest much of a plan. Rather, the gradual changes in the bones of the pigs recovered during this period suggest that, initially, pigs were scavengers around human settlements, where they would also have served as a useful walking larder when hunting failed. They may also have been useful in cleaning up human wastes, including feces: The “pig-toilet” is still found in some parts of Goa (India) and China, and was probably once widespread throughout Asia.

The likely origins of the pig's domestication shed important light onto the process in general; domestication is almost certainly as much the agency of animals as of humans. In the case of the pig, every human
settlement near a population of wild boars was a potential source of domestication: Once the settlement had grown to a suitable size, a few boars with the right temperament to tolerate the proximity of humans moved in, exploited the new food source, and were themselves exploited as food. In many cases these arrangements would have died out temporarily, perhaps when food shortages resulted in the consumption of all the pigs in the village. But the whole cycle could easily have started again in better times, if there were still wild boars in the vicinity. Domestication could have followed much later, presumably when the conditions were right among the local people—for example, when their culture allowed for individual or family (rather than communal) ownership, which would protect the animals against slaughter when food was in short supply. The next stage would have been the evolution of husbandry methods such as enclosure to protect the captive pigs from predators, and the selective culling of the more belligerent males, reducing the risk of injury to their human captors.

Since there is no indication that dogs were initially domesticated as food animals, the details of its story are likely to be different from those of the pig, but the transition from wild to domesticated was probably just as piecemeal and haphazard. If the pig took two thousand years to change from hanger-on to agricultural animal, most likely the dog took just as long, perhaps even longer. With no prior experience in domestication, humans are unlikely to have deliberately begun the process of domesticating wolves; a much more probable scenario is that the wolves themselves started the process. Indeed, I'm firmly of the opinion that the pioneers of the long road to today's dogs were wolves that were simply exploiting a new niche, a new concentration of food provided by man, as humans began to live in villages rather than being constantly on the move. These wolves then evolved to fit our new lifestyle, which would have demanded capabilities very different from hunting on the open range.

Living near human settlements would have required a tolerance of the proximity of humans that no modern wolf can manage, and probably few ancient wolves could have either—but humans would almost certainly have aided in selecting for this trait. Initially, those wolves that were suited to scavenging from man would have prospered and produced
offspring, whereas those wolves that were unsuited either did not or left to rejoin their wild cousins. It is difficult to imagine how hunter-gatherer humans could have actively intervened in this process; selecting which male would breed with which female, for instance, would have been unlikely at such a tenuous stage. However, humans probably did intervene, in a much less deliberate way—one that nevertheless speeded up the separation between village and wild wolves.

Humans must have at least tolerated the wolves that were gravitating to their settlements, because otherwise such a transition could never have taken place. There must have been times, of course, when having a large well-armed carnivore hanging around would have been dangerous. The very young and the infirm would have been at particular risk from an animal, perhaps only a few generations removed from a wild hunter, that had run out of food to scavenge. Any wolf that threatened to injure a human must have been driven away or even killed; only wolves that posed no apparent threat would have been allowed to remain in the village for very long.

The domestication-by-scavenging hypothesis is a start, but it cannot be the whole story, for it seems unlikely that wolves would have been able to survive entirely on the by-products of early human settlements. Modern village dogs can get most of their food by scavenging, but then they are much smaller than wolves are, and modern villages are a lot bigger, and more productive, than hunter-gatherer villages must have been. The scavenger theory depends, critically, on whether hunter-gatherers regularly produced enough surplus food to make scavenging worthwhile. Wolves are large and require a great deal of energy—about two thousand calories a day, equivalent to two-and-a-half pounds of meat. It seems unlikely that, twenty thousand years ago, any human settlement would have produced that much surplus meat day after day. It must be remembered, however, that wolves are not strictly carnivorous; they are perfectly capable of subsisting on a diet of plant material supplemented with the occasional bone or scraps of meat. They may even have contributed to village hygiene by performing the same function as today's toilet pig; however unsavory this idea may seem to us today, it would explain the unfortunate penchant that some modern dogs have for eating feces.
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Whether or not the village wolves exploited this insalubrious source
of calories, however, it is hard to imagine that several wolves, even a pair, could do well enough—and survive for long enough to produce offspring—by relying entirely on scavenging. Indeed, it seems illogical that any animal would give up hunting, a way of life for which it had evolved over millions of years, for the uncertainties of scavenging from a species that was not yet as skillful at obtaining meat as it was.

Thus scavenging, while a plausible contributor, isn't nearly sufficient by itself to account for a transition from hanger-on to domestication. Scavenging around hunter-gatherer encampments is unlikely to have provided a reliable source of food even for small wolves, and I thus strongly suspect that there must have been some deliberate feeding by the hunter-gatherers themselves. Of course, such behavior on the part of humans requires explanation: Why would humans give up their own resources to animals that served no clear purpose within the community?

If humans encouraged wolves to stick around by deliberately feeding them, then part of the motivation behind this might possibly lie in the apparently universal human trait of keeping animals as pets. Pet-keeping is not just a modern phenomenon; it is widely practiced among contemporary hunter-gatherer societies and was probably a feature of many pre-agricultural societies as well. In contemporary contexts, these “pets” are usually obtained as very young animals from the wild, perhaps when a nest or den is discovered by the hunters, and are brought back to the village and hand-reared by women and children. As they grow, some of these animals will escape back into the wild; others will become too large or boisterous for comfort and will be driven out, or even killed and eaten. It is apparently rare for the “pets” to breed successfully within the village, so each generation has to be newly obtained from the wild. These are therefore not really pets in the usual sense of the word, but the hunter-gatherers lavish on them the same level of care when they are young as do the owners of a new kitten or puppy in the developed world.

Modern hunter-gatherers have remarkably varied pet-keeping tastes. In some of today's hunter-gatherer societies, such as the Penan of Borneo and the Huaorani of the Amazon rainforest, there seems to be no particular preference for one animal over another. Virtually any young bird or mammal of manageable size may be adopted, such that at any
given time there may be dozens of different species within a single village—parrots, toucans, wild ducks, racoons, small deer, assorted rodents, opossums, and monkeys. Other societies may attach particular importance to one particular species. For example, the Guaja of Amazonia are a matriarchal society, in which all the women keep monkeys as pets; the head woman will have several, while adolescent girls will usually look after just one. They treat their monkeys at least as well as, possibly even better than, their own children. The newly collected infant monkeys are suckled at the breast, constantly fed choice tidbits, and carried everywhere—the matriarch will usually have two or three draped over her head and shoulders as a sort of living robe of office. In other such cultures—for example, Polynesia, Melanesia, and the Americas—it is dogs who are treated in this way, including the nursing of puppies alongside human infants.

Thanks to contemporary evidence, the most direct of which comes from the indigenous Aboriginal peoples of Australia, we can guess that our ancestors found puppies just as appealing as we do today. There are no grey wolves or other canids in Australia; in their place are dingoes, which are actually the descendents of dogs that reverted to the wild several thousand years ago. Aboriginals were hunter-gatherer-cultivators until recently; they had no domesticated animals but do have a long tradition of taking dingo puppies from the wild and keeping them as pets. Some were collected from litters found accidentally, during hunting trips; others were taken deliberately, as part of religious ceremonies. These puppies were highly valued and well cared for, but as they grew into adults they became a nuisance, stealing food and becoming over-boisterous, and were usually driven away soon after they had become sexually mature. Thus a separate population of domesticated dingoes never emerged—and yet the tradition continues to this day.