The Origin of Man

It was in what is now China. I can't remember which part. Interestingly, it only happened once. They checked the DNA of the wolves that still live in that part of China and it turns out that all dogs are descended from their ancestors. People brought dogs with them everywhere they went. They did not domesticate them independently.

To me this is almost as important a point as the development of language. I believe that the first humans who learned to live in a multi-species community had a significant advantage. After all, if you can love a "person" who is not even of your own species, it perhaps becomes a little easier to love somebody who merely speaks a different language, has different colored skin, or believes in a different god. Could we have achieved what we have today, the ability to care about people on the other side of the planet that we'll never see or hear, who are mere abstractions, if we hadn't first developed the ability to care about the animals who started joining our hunting parties because we could both see the advantages of pooling our talents? It's possible that civilization might not exist if it hadn't been for dogs.

Yes. Wolves spread to North America before the ancestors of the Aztecs got here fifteen to twenty thousand years ago. But the Indians did not domesticate them. The first wave of human migration to the New World occurred before dogs joined forces with humans in China. So the Athabascans had no dogs. The second wave of migration, the Na-Dene around 4000BCE, brought dogs with them, as did the third wave, the Eskimo-Aleuts around 2000BCE. It appears that although the domesticated dogs in western North America (the range of the Na-Dene peoples) crossed the Rockies before the Europeans arrived, they did not spread very far southward. The "indigenous" breeds of dogs in Central and South America, such as the Chihuahua, are clearly of Chinese origin. They are either the result of Chinese adventurers sailing to the New World before the Europeans, failing to establish colonies or even make much of a wave at all, but leaving some dogs behind -- or they were brought over during the very early period of European exploration by sailors who had been to the Orient.

No, the wolves (and coyotes) were here first. But like the later domesticated dogs, they apparently didn't go south either. I don't think there are any indigenous wild canines very far south of Mexico.

Yeah. They surely started out by hunting together and sharing the kill. The dogs could smell prey miles away, run fast enough to keep up with it, and harrass it until the humans arrived to finish it off with their incredible pointy things. Probably later the dogs kept coming closer to the human camps and discovered our weird habit of leaving perfectly good food lying all over the ground. The humans must have loved the decrease in flies and scavengers, and the dogs must have loved the campfires. The dogs were willing to risk their lives to fend off huge predators, and the human females would take care of the puppies while the adult dogs went hunting. I'm sure it was the young of both species who cemented the relationship and turned it into one of love.

Amen. Even if my scenario is exaggerated, there's no question that dogs played a major role in the development of human society. Cats, pigs, goats, and other scavengers and/or pest control specialists eventually joined us voluntarily as well, but dogs have a six thousand year head start on all of them.

If anybody wants a reason to believe the Muslim fundamentalists are as wacky as Daffy Duck, how about the fact that they believe dogs are unclean and don't allow people to have them except for herding and hunting? Talk about denying your heritage as a human being!

btw, speaking of DNA. DNA testing has proven that dogs and wolves are a single species. The difference in DNA between the average mongrel dog and a wolf is less than that between two extreme breeds of dogs, which in turn is far less than that between a human in Norway and one in Borneo. Wolves are simply one breed of dog: the earliest. The only important non-behavioral difference between a wolf and a dog is that the dog has adapted to the lower protein diet of a scavenger. Less protein and less hunting means a smaller brain and smaller teeth.

 

Interesting that you mention Crete. There was a report in today's paper about the discovery of gravesites in Crete in which cats were buried with people. Nothing remarkable about that, they started doing it in Egypt around 4500BC, which is the generally accepted estimated date of the first domestication of cats.

Except that these graves in Crete are from 8000BC. That means that cats were domesticated 4000 years earlier than previously known. Cats were not native to Crete, so it means the human settlers brought them in their boats. It also means that agriculture was flourishing ten thousand years ago: the only reason that cats were interested in and permitted to join our growing multi-species community was because of the rodents that kept stealing our grain.

This puts cats much closer to dogs in terms of their history with us, just a couple of millennia apart in the date of their earliest domestication.

Prior to this it had seemed that pigs and goats had become camp-followers long before cats because they are scavengers that were attracted by our garbage and were welcomed because they are good to eat.

Yet cats and dogs share a nearly identical special place in our hearts and our collective unconscious that is closed to pigs and goats. It was odd that cats, who are not social animals like humans and dogs and therefore undoubtedly took longer to form a bond that was based on more than services rendered, could have achieved this status in only half the time that dogs have been around.

This new dating puts the pieces of the puzzle together in a more satisfying way.

This by no means contradicts the hypothesis that humans had already reached Crete via a land bridge during an ice age. There might very well have been a Mesolithic tribe living there happily when the boats showed up. Since the newcomers did not have bronze weapons with which to overwhelm the natives, we can hope that their encounter and assimilation was more peaceful than similar events which occurred during historical times.