When did dogs arise? New study points at tail-end of Ice Age
More than 14,000 years ago, early dogs were already thronging Eurasia and the Levant, and were loved. In Israel, Natufian pooches exhibit some peculiarities
Haaretz
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More than 14,000 years ago, early dogs were already thronging Eurasia and the Levant, and were loved. In Israel, Natufian pooches exhibit some peculiarities
Long, long ago, just how long we are not sure, hunter-gatherers were scouring Eurasia and the Levant in an ever more desperate search for prey. But they were not alone. Thousands of years before the first seed was planted, the first sheep was cowed or the first goat was captured once and for all and climbed a tree to escape – we had dogs.
We had no fields of grain, no cultivated grape, nary a plump cow or even permanent homes. We were roaming hunter-gatherers and that is the situation in which the dog was domesticated. Or domesticated itself, springing from the Late Glacial eastern Asian wolf like a hairy Venus emerging out of a clam.
The burning question is how many thousands of years ago this was. Now a study published in Nature puts paid to no controversies, definitely answers no flaming queries, resolves no riddles but does reveal that by 14,300 years ago, the same population of dogs was found throughout Europe and Turkey – they were genetically homogenous. There was already One Dog that arose from the eastern gray wolf, with local variations. Later the original lineage of proto-dog mixed with other wolf species too as it spread around the world.
The earliest Levantine dogs can't be genetically analyzed because ancient DNA techniques don't work in baking heat. One dog that could be analyzed from 7,200 years ago had partial Levantine wolf ancestry too.
In short, by 14,300 years ago the domesticated dog had spread throughout today's Europe, United Kingdom, Turkey, much of Asia including Japan and parts of the Middle East. The earliest identified European dog, in Kesslerloch from 14,200 years ago, was already closer to ancient and current European dogs than to Asian dogs; ergo, dogs were domesticated earlier; and Asian dogs branched off from that lineage.
"We know there are genetically identified dogs by 16,000 years ago in western Eurasia and highly differentiated dogs in East Asia," co-author Greger Larson adds in an email, referring among others to the dingo of Australia and to the Singing Dogs of New Guinea. Just to get them out of the way, the singing dog and the dingo had a common ancestor who split off in early domesticated dogdom. Subsequently, dingoes became isolated in Australia and would stay so for more than 5,000 years.
Also let us be clear that a "singing" dog is a howling one. In addition, let us be super clear that the dingo and singing dog are wild animals. They descended from dogs at some stage of domestication but are not suitable as pets for the same reasons wolves aren't: they won't grovel for our condescending approval and would as soon as eat you as fetch that stupid stick you threw.
Singing Dog: An ancient branch off the dog tree vocalizes
What have we? A wealth of new information showing that Fido sprang from Fang likely even earlier than 16,000 years ago. The same dogs also reached North America with the first emigrants to the New World. Early New World dogs, some of them small (knee-high), were not begat by American wolves but hailed from Siberia.
"It kind of suggests, because dogs had spread so widely, that they must have emerged several thousand years earlier. We can only speculate but definitely before 15,000 or even 25,000 years ago," explains study co-author Anders Bergstrom of the University of East Anglia. "Some proposed a much earlier domestication event, at around 35,000 to 30,000 years ago but nobody believes those were dogs – maybe just wolves," he adds.
Eurasian wolf. Your dog wouldn't have resistedCredit: Mas3cf
Eurasian wolf. Your dog wouldn't have resistedCredit: Mas3cf
This fits with separate research that identified dogs in Siberia 23,000 years ago. He adds that some suggest much earlier dates. One theory posits dogdom's origin at 135,000 years ago but that hypothesis is widely pooh-poohed, including on the grounds that earlier humanity likely lacked the social complexity to enable such an alien alliance. But dog domestication as early as the Last Glacial Maximum is possible, Bergstrom sums up, referring to a time 26,000 to 19,000 years ago when the last Ice Age reached its peak.
"Siberia 23,000 years ago is still possible. But so is western Eurasia at that time," he says. "Everything is in play."
Abandoning Og
Why is canine prehistory so enigmatic? One problem with genetic origin analyses is the uncertainties inherent to the dating technique; and one in archaeology is distinguishing wolf bones from dog. Nobody would mistake a dead bulldog for a wolf but in the case of large breeds like huskies, uncertainty may ensue. There's an overlap.
Skulls of brachycephalic bulldogsCredit: Naturhistorisches Museum der Burgergemeinde Bern / Marc Nussbaumer
Skulls of brachycephalic bulldogsCredit: Naturhistorisches Museum der Burgergemeinde Bern / Marc Nussbaumer
By now we know that Canis familiaris arose from the gray wolf, Bergstrom tells Haaretz over Zoom. But gray wolf genomic history reveals a dual ancestry of dogs. The descendants merrily mixed with other wolves too. Like all dogs today, the Levantine one arose from eastern Asian wolves, then got involved with the scrawny Levantine variant.
Arabian wolf, aka Levant wolf, a type also found in IsraelCredit: Ahmad Qarmish12Arabian wolf, aka Levant wolf, a type also found in IsraelCredit: Ahmad Qarmish12
While the genetic evidence points at emergence 25,000 years ago, with some pretty startling margins of error, the earliest archaeological evidence is in the form of dog burials begins about 17,000 years ago.
A caveat: Zooarchaeologists are not 100-percent confident all these remains were dog, rather than some interim mongrel, but the bond is clear.
As the Ice Age retreated, animals with "probable dog morphology" were buried in Bonn-Oberkassel, Kesslerloch, Le Morin, Errala and Paglicci, from 17,000 to 14,000 years ago. In Natufian Israel, dogs were buried like people, says Reuven Yeshurun of the University of Haifa, an archaeologist and expert on the Epipaleolithic period who was not involved in the European-dogs study.
"If they troubled to bury a person with a dog, they had a relationship beyond who ate whom," he points out.
The Natufians were preagricultural hunter-gatherers who were among the first to build houses, even forming early villages. While some believe that they buried their garbage hygienically, pointing to disarticulated animal bones in human graves, Yeshurun does not view the Natufians as prehistoric Martha Stewarts. "They did not do much cleaning and maintenance of their food refuse, which we find scattered all over the houses. The only careful cleaning and stashing of food remains was in graves, presumably following some kind of funerary feast," he says.
Feasts involving who? Well, they didn't eat dogs, says Natufian expert Leore Grosman of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Those were interred articulated like people, contrasting with the cut-up, butchered remains of other animals in the graves.
Natufian burial of woman and a dog, 12,000 years ago, Ain Mallaha, IsraelCredit: Gary Todd / Israel Museum, JeruNatufian burial of woman and a dog, 12,000 years ago, Ain Mallaha, IsraelCredit: Gary Todd / Israel Museum, Jeru
Out of hundreds of Natufian graves, three had dogs. That proportion implies that dogs were rare but corroborating circumstantial evidence includes nonhuman gnaw marks on animal bones in Natufian garbage, Yeshurun says. Distinguishing hyena tooth marks from dog, let alone scavenging wolves, is difficult, but we can assume the Natufians discouraged large predators other than their own from running riot in the village.
He adds that the new genetic research is a blessed addition to morphological claims, noting a skull of "a peculiar wolf" in a cave on Mount Carmel in Israel published in 1937, which was claimed to be doglike. Now, with more Natufian dogs at hand, they do look like peculiar wolves with short muzzle and a low braincase, he says.
Another avenue of research for ancient dogs is signs of care. If a canine died old and sick, it had been cared for, he adds.
By the way, humans may have tried to tame other canids but it didn't take. Foxes have been lurking around our camps for tens of thousands of years and pet foxes did not ensue. Early North Americans may have tried to charm another wolf over there, with no success.
Conclusions? "The archaeological record does not clearly point to any particular geographical region as the center of domestication," Bergstrom and the team sum up. Nor to any particular time, but dogs were already branching off that tree in eastern Asia by 16,000 years ago, and the new research supports early domestication dates.
Gray wolf pack in the forest, Germany.Credit: Ondrej Prosicky / Shutterstock.comGray wolf pack in the forest, Germany.Credit: Ondrej Prosicky / Shutterstock.com
But wait. Don't we now see a massive mismatch between what we know of human migrations over the last 25,000 years and the dispersal of early dog? We do. There were no large-scale human migrations we know of that could explain such dog dispersal, Bergstrom confirms.
Possibly dogs were being exchanged among the ancient peoples of Eurasia, like obsidian blades or other goodies, the team suggests.
What? They were bartering dogs? Not necessarily: "Exchanged dogs simply means that dogs could move between different groups of people without having to travel with those people," Larson explains.
Ah, the dogs were exchanging themselves. It is plausible that early dogs didn't necessarily stick with the community that adopted them/they adopted. They got about. Chase rabbit, see another human group. They make food fire! Ooh. Before leashes, that makes sense.
Needing Fido
The very development of agriculture and of herbivore husbandry – that is, the management, breeding and dietary care of plant-eating animals – after dog domestication, may shed light why we needed the dog in the first place.
In the last 1.5 million years, the body mass of land animals shrank by over 98 percent. Research at Tel Aviv University shows that humans hunted big animals to extinction and that in each region where they did so, they were forced to hunt smaller ones. As the prey shrank, the humans had to improve their technology (think club to spear to arrow) and at some point, the thinking is, they began to hunt with dogs.
That tool development trajectory is simplified but that's the gist, according to Tel Aviv University. Yeshurun doesn't feel the evidence for prehistoric dog-assisted hunting is there, though it is a possibility. In Shubayqa, Jordan, archaeologists suggest indirect evidence of co-hunting 11,500 years ago. Did they find a dog ritually interred with a hare in its jaws and perhaps grave goods to indicate he had been a good boy?
No, archaeologists detected a spike in hare bones in the human settlement, that had been gnawed by somebody nonhuman. We can assume the dogs were not needed to herd sheep because the mouflon hadn't been domesticated yet. It is plausible therefore that we domesticated dogs to help us catch prey, which they would then have to be trained not to eat, but to bring home.
Haaretz had always wondered about how that went down. Grosman compares the wolf with wild wheat. "The dog is a mutation of wolf that has specific characteristics that we chose," she says. We chose wheat with plump seeds that cannot reproduce without our agency, and chose wolves who had been commensally feeding on our garbage and who would ... do what? Anyway, it worked. The Natufians definitely had a special connection with this animal, Grosman says. She adds that one cemetery had no dog burials but did have a jewel made of a dog molar, suggesting the creature had been valued.
Burial of a dog with bowls, for food and water? At Ban Non Wat, Iron AgeCredit: Alison Kyra CarterBurial of a dog with bowls, for food and water? At Ban Non Wat, Iron AgeCredit: Alison Kyra Carter
Thousands of years after the Natufians and 1,000 years after the agricultural revolution, early farmers began to surge out of today's Anatolia toward Europe, taking their dogs with them. The farmers would largely replace the indigenous peoples, all the way to Britain.
Did the Anatolian dogs do the same to the local dogs living with the local indigenous peoples? Did their dogs take over like the humans had?
They did not. "We find: not really! There was some influx; maybe 50 percent genetic replacement," says Bergstrom, compared with 80-90 percent genetic replacement of the humans.
Good grief. We don't know the mechanism by which the Anatolian farmers replaced the Europeans but the dogs seems to have integrated with the local pack. "That perhaps suggests that the dogs played at least somewhat similar roles in hunter-gatherer and farmer society," Bergstrom says, adding that yes, they could distinguish the European hunter-gatherers' dogs from the Anatolian dogs, even though they had the same origin sometime in the deep prehistoric past.
