From the LA Unleashed Blog:
Mexican researchers said Wednesday they have identified jawbones found in the pre-Hispanic ruins of Teotihuacan as those of wolf-dogs that were apparently crossbred as a symbol of the city’s warriors.
The National Institute of Anthropology and History said the jawbones were found during excavations in 2004 and are the first physical evidence of what appears to be intentional crossbreeding in ancient Mexican cultures.
The jawbones were found in a warrior’s burial at a Teotihuacan pyramid. Anthropological studies performed at Mexico’s National Autonomous University indicate the animal was a wolf-dog.
“In oral traditions and old chronicles, dog-like animals appear with symbols of power or divinity,” said institute spokesman Francisco De Anda. “But we did not have skeletal evidence … this is the first time we have proof.”
Wolf- or dog-like creatures appear in paintings at Teotihuacan, but had long been thought to be depictions of coyotes, which also inhabit the region. But archaeologists are now reevaluating that interpretation.
Several jawbones were made into a sort of decorative garment found on the warrior’s skeleton at the 2,000-year-old site north of Mexico City.
The wolf-dog apparently served as a symbol of strength and power.
Dogs and wolves are very similar genetically, and there has been evidence of ancient remains that may show natural crossbreeding.
But archaeologist Raul Valadez said the animal was the result of intentional selection. While the inhabitants of Teotihuacan had dogs, wolves and coyotes, they almost exclusively used wolf-dog bones in the ceremonial arrangement.
Of the bones found, eight were wolf-dog, three were dogs and two were crosses of coyotes and wolf-dogs.
These wolves would have likely been Canis lupus baileyi, which is now extinct in the wild in Mexico. They were actually known to hybridize with domestic dogs as the subspecies became rare in the wild. A whole line of these wolves that was kept at Carlsbad Caverns was euthanized under the suspicion that they were “contaminated” with dog blood. However, it was later found that these wolves had no evidence of dog hybridization in their MtDNA sequences.
This is yet another example of a gene flow between wild and domestic populations of Canis lupus, although the exact wild nature of these wolves is certainly in question. It is possible that these wolves lived in a state of semi-domestication. Historically, it hasn’t been very hard to habituate wolves to people, and it wouldn’t be very hard to breed an habituated wolf to a dog.
Or maybe they were urban wolves, like this one in Romania. Because there is no evidence of these people persecuting the wolves, they would have had more reason to hang around the city and have opportunities to breed with dogs.
The people of Teotihuacan were fairly good animal keepers. There is evidence that they were adept at keeping pumas and jaguars in captivity, so it would not be all that strange that they kept both wolves and coyotes in this manner.
Throughout their long history, dogs have retained some of their genetic diversity through wild blood. Now that wolves have been pushed very far from human societies,and dogs have undergone extensive selective breeding, these differences seem much more extreme than they once were.
But through much of that history, dog and wolf have bred with each other–sometimes intentionally, as seems to be the case here, and sometimes accidentally, as is likely the case with the evolution of black wolves in North America.
These ancient Mexicans worshiped the dog and the wolf. The hybrid was likely much like the character they lauded in the warrior. The warrior was civilized in his manner during times of peace and as savage as a wild animal in times of war. That dichotomy was celebrated when these hybrids were used for these ceremonial arrangements.
Perhaps one could find evidence ancient North American dogs were actually hybrids. It was suggested that the domestic dogs kept by various peoples of the Southeast were nothing more than tamed red wolves. Black red wolves were very common, which is why they had the archaic scientific name Canis niger.
However, all the studies I’ve seen suggest that New World domestic dogs from both the Pre-Columbian and modern era have predominantly or entirely Old World ancestry.
More work needs to be performed in examining the genetics of these New World dogs.
I suspect that some “dogs” from South America might actually be domesticated versions of South American wild dogs, as was the case with the Perro Yagan, the domesticated culpeo of Tierra del Fuego.
The intentional hybridization of Mexican wolves and domestic dogs at Teotihuacan shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone. We have evidence of wolf hybridization in the origin of certain Finnish and Scandinavian breeds. To find archeological evidence of hybridization in Mexico is just more evidence that dogs and wolves do not represent distinct species.
They represent the beautiful and wondrous diversity that is the species we call Canis lupus. From two-pound chihuahuas that fit nicely in handbags to giant bone crushing wolves that lived in Alaska during the Pleistocene, this species has had the ability to occur in some many different shapes and sizes.
The people of Teotihuacan were probably a little amazed when their domestic bitches bred wolves and produced puppies. Such a crossbreeding from such different looking animals would have been fascinating– almost to the point that it would have required a divine explanation.
And once that explanation would have been put in place, it wouldn’t have been very long before some priesthood would come up with a need to use them for ceremonial purposes.
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According to Art Daily, some of the remains are from dog-coyote hybrids and to crosses with wolfdogs and coyotes, so intentional wolf and dog crosses were not the only Canis hybrids these people were creating for this purpose.
I strongly disagree with the suggestion in the Art Daily piece that pumas (cougars) are more easily domesticated than wolves. We have no domesticated cougars, but we have hundreds of millions of domestic dogs throughout the world. Not all wolves become status seeking machines in captive situations. Adolph Murie had one named Wags that was basically a golden retriever in wolf form.
Coincidentally, I met two wolf hybrids last week at the clinic. Both might as well have been dogs as far as their manner and friendliness.
This WON’T be popular. So, string me up with words. However, I say dog breeds came before the wolf. And, the wolf was originally created to be a dog who could survive in the wildlands.
Here’s my theory:
Wolves and dogs have an obvious common ancestor.
I think this common ancestor behaved more like a dog and less like a wolf.
The populations that became wolves were those that suffered selection pressures toward paranoia, emotional reactivity, and fear. Dogs experienced a selection pressure towards more docility.
Selecting for lack of fear in the Belyaev experiment changed the length of critical periods for socialization. Selection for fear likely has the exact opposite experience.
I think what you have to say has some merit, actually. Wolves have experienced selection pressures long after dogs existed, and that has formed wolves as we know them today. It is an error to assume that the wolves we have right now are exactly like the wolves that existed during the Pleistocene, which is where we now date the origin of the domestic dogs.
The ancestral population of wolves had to have been very easily domesticated– much more so than modern wolves typically are.
The guy that thinks cougars are more easily domesticated(which they have yet to be–there are TAMED individual cougars, but that is a long way from true domestication, of course) than wolves has obviously NOT been around many captive cougars OR wolves! Wolves are social pack animals, and their social structure is so much like early hunter-gatherers(human), it is not hard to see how easily they became associated with them, and eventually were domesticated into dogs. Any historical accounts that describe wolves in frontier areas where they have not been persecuted yet by mankind, remark on how tame and curious and friendly they can be towards humans. A good modern example is the Arctic Wolves on Ellesmere island. So indeed, wolves in most areas HAVE been selected for wildness by human persecution over the centuries. As for them being difficult to tame for modern humans–remember, the hunter-gatherers of those days were not yet “domesticated” themselves, as are most people now! And probably got along with semi-tamed wolves quite easily–they had none of the expectations we do of our dogs today….and Savanna Kougar–that was a joke, right? What “breed” of dog could possibly be older than wolves? Since wolves were(ahem) around before there were even any modern humans?(the Cro-Magnon stage, at least). Unless you don’t agree with Paleotological evidence, and are more into the Creation thingy…….
…..An interesting bit of history on wolves in the North American West mentions how the wolves had learned the range of accuracy of Native Americans with bows and arrows, and tended to stay just that far from people when encountered. They quickly had to readjust this distance(and did!) when guns came on the scene with the European invasion. I imagine wolves formerly stayed just out of spear range, before the invention of bows and arrows! But this does show how their behaviour and “shyness” has changed as our weaponry has changed…..
[...] throughout Mexico. The word coyote is derived from the Nahuatl word “coyotl,” and pre-Columbian Mexican civilizations even kept coyotes in menageries, sometimes crossbreeding them with dogs and Mexican [...]