Animals as Domesticates: A World View through History

1. Eurasia after the Ice

11 1 Eurasia after the Ice Around , years ago the Northern Hemisphere was in the grip of the coldest phase of the last Ice Age, the Neanderthal race of humans (Homo neanderthalensis) was almost extinct, and anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens) were living as huntergatherers in small groups wherever the icy cold allowed them to find food and shelter. But the world was warming up, and in “fits and starts” over the next 5,000 years the huge ice sheets that covered the land and sea were beginning to melt. Between 17,000 and 13,000 years ago a few families in western Russia and central Europe must have been keeping tame wolf pups because the remains of canids that are morphologically different from the bones and teeth of wolves begin to appear on archaeological sites, along with the skeletal remains of wild horses and other animals that had been hunted for food.1 The archaeozoological evidence indicates that wolves were the first species to be domesticated , and it is not difficult to see why, for the gray wolf (Canis lupus), progenitor of all dogs, is a ubiquitous species that was originally distributed over the entire Northern Hemisphere. Wolves can flourish in lands that vary from the deserts of Arabia to the Arctic tundra. While Eurasia was still covered in ice sheets, wolves that became dogs, being carnivores and scavengers , could live off the detritus around the temporary camps of nomadic human hunters, even where the winter temperature reached minus 30 degrees Celsius or even lower, and they could travel over any distances in a symbiotic relationship with their human companions. With the advance of molecular science there have been several major studies of the genetic history of dogs and the relationships of breeds. One of the earliest of these, by Carles Vilà and colleagues in 1997, caused much controversy with its premise that the genetic separation between wolf and dog occurred around 135,000 years ago, which is before the emergence of anatomically modern humans.2 Until recently there has been no morphological evidence for the presence of a separate canid that could be described as “dog” before around 17,000 years ago. However, a multidisciplinary study of canid remains from Palaeolithic sites in Belgium, Ukraine, and Russia appears to show that there were “dogs” that could be distinguished from wolves living on some sites 30,000 years ago.3 The most spectacular canid find from these sites is, however, later in date. It is from the Epigravettian Eliseevich I site on the Russian plain, and has an age of around 13,900 years. There, a dog skull, one of two, was found in a hearth deposit near a concentration of mammoth skulls. Its braincase had been perforated on the left and right sides, and cut marks are present on the zygomatic and frontal bones. With the exception of the canines and some premolars, all its teeth are missing. In addition, the left and right carnassial teeth were apparently removed by cutting into the alveoli.4 It should be noted, however, that even if it can be proved with some certainty from morphological and genetic 12| Chapter 1 analyses that there were “dogs” in the Palaeolithic 30,000 years ago, this is still 100,000 years after the claim of Vilà and colleagues for a genetic divergence between wolf and dog at the very early date of 135,000 years ago.5 The problem with believing in the establishment of a race of canid evolved from but genetically separate and morphologically distinct from the wolf is that the “dogs” would have to be reproductively isolated over many generations from their progenitor, the wolf. It is difficult to see how this could be brought about with the small number of “dogs” that would be living as commensals with nomadic hunters in the Ice Age tundra. When a bitch came into oestrus, she would be mated by the local wolves, and her puppies would not retain the changed behavioral patterns of tameness and lack of aggression that enabled their mother to live in close association with a human group. The coldest phase of the last Ice Age was between 20,000 and 12,000 years ago when the tundra of northern Europe and Asia was dominated by the “mammoth fauna.” This is the name given to the assemblage of large mammals whose remains are commonly identified from geological and archaeological deposits of this period. The main species besides mammoths were bison...