Dog Domestication at 33,000 ya

New evidence now suggests dog domestication 33,000 ya. Dog skulls from two different locations, Siberia and Belgium, date to circa 31,000 BC. The skulls were morphologically dog-shaped, not wolf-shaped.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/9037270/Dogs-were-mans-best-friend-33000-years-ago.html

Comments, FR?

 

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Wow, that's pretty amazing! 33,000 is a lot longer ago than previously thought, as I recall.

 

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you mentioned Belgium , at that time and that area is Neanderthal territory and Siberia Denisow territory

 

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Yes, but it was likely dual occupancy, with homo sapiens already being extant by nearly 100,000 years, and having left Africa circa 60,000 BC. Of course, it is possible that Neanderthals domesticated the dog, and then sapiens adopted the habit from them, but the article does not mention concurrent humanoid fossils. That would be interesting to find sapiens remains with dog remains; but even more interesting to find neanderthal or denisow remains with dog remains!

 

I somehow have a filling Neanderthal was or is underestimated , he was clever by residing closer to th Atlantic coast were ice was not in the ground. The movement of the modern man into the area of Belgium would be relatively late , because there are many geographical obstacles.

 

But this small pack could also be the descendants of one of those groupings of dogs from many generations earlier, with modern dogs being the descendants of that one pack that became the dominant one, because it was associated with the dominant humans.

Could you cite the article about the DNA analysis?

 

That's pretty crazy. Interesting article. Thanks for the good read.

 

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An international team of scientists has just identified what they believe is the world's first known dog, which was a large and toothy canine that lived 31,700 years ago and subsisted on a diet of horse, musk ox and reindeer, according to a new study.

The discovery could push back the date for the earliest dog by 17,700 years, since the second oldest known dog, found in Russia, dates to 14,000 years ago.

Remains for the older prehistoric dog, which were excavated at Goyet Cave in Belgium, suggest to the researchers that the Aurignacian people of Europe from the Upper Paleolithic period first domesticated dogs. Fine jewelry and tools, often decorated with depictions of big game animals, characterize this culture.

If Paleolithic dogs still existed as a breed today, they would surely win best in show for strength and biting ability.

"In shape, the Paleolithic dogs most resemble the Siberian husky, but in size, however, they were somewhat larger, probably comparable to large shepherd dogs," added Germonpré, a paleontologist at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences.

For the study, which has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Archaeological Science, the scientists analyzed 117 skulls of recent and fossil large members of the Canidae family, which includes dogs, wolves and foxes.

Skeletal analysis revealed, "the Paleolithic dogs had wider and shorter snouts and relatively wider brain cases than fossil and recent wolves," said Germonpré, who added that their skulls were also somewhat smaller than those of wolves.
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DNA studies determined all of the canids carried "a substantial amount of genetic diversity," suggesting that past wolf populations were much larger than they are today.

Isotopic analysis of the animals' bones found that the earliest dogs consumed horse, musk ox and reindeer, but not fish or seafood. Since the Aurignacians are believed to have hunted big game and fished at different times of the year, the researchers think the dogs might have enjoyed meaty handouts during certain seasons.

Germonpré believes dog domestication might have begun when the prehistoric hunters killed a female wolf and then brought home her pups. Recent studies on silver foxes suggest that when the most docile pups are kept and cared for, it takes just 10 generations of breeding for morphological changes to take effect.

The earliest dogs likely earned their meals too.

"I think it is possible that the dogs were used for tracking, hunting, and transport of game," she said. "Transport could have been organized using the dogs as pack animals. Furthermore, the dogs could have been kept for their fur or meat, as pets, or as an animal with ritual connotation."

Image: Dog skull
Mietje Germonpre
The skull of what may be the earliest known dog, which dates to 31,700 years ago. The prehistoric skull was excavated at Goyet Cave in Belgium.
Ancient, 26,000-year-old footprints made by a child and a dog at Chauvet Cave, France, support the pet notion. Torch wipes accompanying the prints indicate the child held a torch while navigating the dark corridors accompanied by a dog.

Susan Crockford, a University of Victoria anthropologist and an evolutionary biologist at Pacific Identifications, Inc. in Canada, told Discovery News that "this is an important paper."

Crockford, however, is not convinced the Aurignacians domesticated dogs. She instead suspects dogs may have undergone "self-domestication" from wolves more than once over history, which could explain why the animals appear and then seemingly disappear from the archaeological record.

Crockford details the possible process in her book, Rhythms of Life: Thyroid Hormone and the Origin of Species. She theorizes that the genes that control thyroid rhythms, allowing individuals to adapt to changing environmental conditions, can, over time, lead to the evolution of new species.

"I think that for these Paleolithic-age canids, the process got started and then stopped, leaving some individual wolves with a few of the features of early dogs, but not all of them," she said.

Germonpré does not dismiss Crockford's theory, which she described as "a very interesting model." She hopes more information will come to light in the future about these very early canines. An extensive study on their teeth and jaws is already in the works.

 

All the study of morphology in the world will never answer the real question. Domestication is not the result of morphological change - morphological change is the result of domestication. Domestication is a cultural process for man, and a social process for wolves. Once it happens, then, in a few generations, morphological change will take place which can be identified in the archeological record. But true domestication will always have preceeded the change.

Rich

 

If you consider practical behavior within migrating pre-humans, pre-humans had more in common with the dogs than apes in terms of behavior. Apes are smart and social but lazy. The dog is more adaptive and a go getter, is able to work in groups or alone. It gets along with other species, and can even lead other species. (sheep). But most of all dogs can do jobs.

My opinion is that humans and dogs helped to domesticate each other. Apes may be better at abstract thinking. But dogs can do jobs such as hunting, birding, seeing eye, guard, herding, scent, fighting, etc. These practical abilities were more useful to humans who are migrating and facing constant survival needs. If we took apes along for the migration, we would need to feed then and waste time containing them. But a dog will earn his keep. Survival does not need lazy. The lazy human ape learned to be industrious via their connection to dogs.

Humans chose dogs over apes, way back when, because apes were useless for the needs of survival, other than as food. The smartest ape in the world can't hold a job. When times are tough we need all hands on deck. Dogs were able to adapt to any environment, just like humans. The humans learned from dogs how to work asa team in any environment they found themselves in.

Seeing yourself in the mirror and known this is you is excellent, but that and $1 will get you a cup of coffee. The pre-humans needed helpers, since they descending from a long line of lazy apes and needed help with the unknown.

 

Wellwisher: That is interesting specultion and moralizing, but it isn't science. You've proposed no ways to test your assertions - and most of them can't be tested.

Rich

 

So are these 'wild dogs' ones that escaped from the earliest domestication of dogs in that region, and are thus actually dogs, not wolves?

If so, then that simply shows that it is indeed possible that dogs were introduced into Mesopotamia when the people settled the area, and some of those dogs escaped into the wild. The ones that did not would then have become the ancestors of modern dogs (i.e normal dogs, not the other wild dogs such as in Australia, etc.).

Somewhere I read an article that there is a wild dog in Florida that escaped from the earliest humans in the region. I don't have anything on dating of its origin, but it is 'primitive' and believed to be closer to the wolf than most dogs.

 

For those who think that a wolf is just a slightly bigger dog, check this out, especially the video:

Don't Mess with Grandma!

http://blog.kingsoutdoorworld.com/2011/10/29/wolf-attack-on-idaho-woman-september-2011/

 

I agree, but in hunting societies. dogs need not have necessarily served the hunters in the hunt. They were useful in providing an alarm and help defend their relatively fixed human group which, as hunter/gatherers, were generally fixed until the territory was used up before moving on to a new one.

In the upper Paleolithic we find the cave paintings and human grouping that had expanded into fixed and larger, mass-hunting and trapping settlements in which dogs would have as much use to us as we had to them.

Brough

 

The Neolithic began about 12,000 years ago, and there is very little evidence of truely domesticated dogs before that time. These recent finds from Siberia and Europe may be domesticated dogs, or they may not; the decision can't be made on currently available information. What is clear, from the genetics, at least, is that domestication is a process which takes time, and which happened in at least three different places in the world, so that the subspecies C. l. familiaris is polyphyletic, if a subspecies can even be that. The domestication of dogs on any appreciable scale, and certainly the development of recognizable breeds, is a Neolithic phenomenon.

Charles, what you may be thinking of in the SE US is the Red Wolf, which has been given specific status as Canis rufus, but which the most recent genetics suggests is simply Canis lupus lycaon, the easter Gray Wolf. The US Fish and Wildlife Service hs chosen to ignore the genetics, of course, because if the Red Wolf is not a full species, the ESA would no longer support the Red Wolf Program, and they don't want to lose their funding.

 

Fraggle: Note that I did NOT say "...the development of modern breeds......" There are recognizable breeds of ancient dogs in the Old World as well as the New back 7,000 or 8,000 years ago. Some of them may or may not be ancestral to modern breeds, particularly the more stable hunting and working breeds. But that wasn't what I was talking about, I was speaking only of the fact that even back in the Neolithic we can recongize several varieties of dogs, based primarily on size and somewhat on morphology. In the case of the North American dogs, we also have enough mummies so that we know something about the pelage of some of the Indian dogs as well.

None of the present wolves have any more than a small amount on coyote gene introgression. The work of the Toronto group on canid genetics doesn't get much play in the US, because the USFWS doesn't like their results.

Rich