Arguments over dog origins generally fall into two categories:
Where? And when?
Where and when has the attendant question of “How?”
In the late 90′s and the early part of this century, almost everyone believed that dogs were derived from midden scavengers in the Neolithic.
Towards the middle part of the first decade of the twenty-first century, Savolainen’s big mitochondrial DNA studies came out and suggested that dogs were domesticated in East Asia, eventually refined to southeastern China.
In the middle of the 1990′s, Robert Wayne’s early mitochondrial DNA analysis put the date of dog domestication so far back that virtually no one accepted it. His research suggested dogs were derived from at least four domestication events, but that the domestication happened 135,000 years ago.
Such an early date was universally poo-pooed.
Many became very heavily wedded to the Neolithic scavenger hypothesis and the attendant domestication= neoteny hypothesis, which has never been properly evaluated with proper scientific scrutiny. In this scenario, wolves scavenged out of the trash heaps of the Neolithic, there was a selection pressure for tameness.
And that was necessary for dogs to evolve from wolves. They had to live on a less nutritious diet, so their brains and jaws got smaller. Dogs are nothing more than neotenic wolves that evolved to live on garbage.
Now, this hypothesis is still quite popular.
But it’s got several problems, not the least of which is that many animals, including many species of wild dog, scavenge off of people, but they have not become tame, neotenic, or smaller brained as result of it.
And never mind that many claims about brain size and dog domestication result from improper comparisons between domestic dogs and larger brained northern wolves. When compared with the southern wolves from which dogs most likely derive, many improved Western breeds actually have brains that are the same size as those wolves.
And never mind that there are wolves that have been tamed and used as working animals. Historical records of which can be found all over this blog with a simple query into the search function.
Of course, historical research is actually outside the purview of most biologists, so they continue to operate in this paradigm.
Mark Derr recently took to task a recent article by Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods that tried to posit that man and the wolf were constantly at war with each other and that the only way dogs could have ever been domesticated is through scavenging.
The truth is this entire domestication paradigm depends upon dogs being domesticated relatively late, for only during the development of agriculture would there have been enough resources in trash heaps to feed enough scavenging wolves that could then evolve into dogs.
In the first decade of this century, this hypothesis seemed plausible. All the paleontologists and archaeologists who had studied dogs found them to be no later than the Neolithic, except for a few strange dogs, like the now famous dog from the Bonn-Oberkassel site that dated to 14,000 year ago.
When I was first exploring dog domestication, this animal was sometimes treated as evidence that dogs were domesticated in Germany, which as a German-American had me somewhat enthralled, or as an anomaly. 14,000 years ago, Germany was not yet in the Neolithic culture. It was still a land of hunter-gatherers, so it suggested that dogs were domesticated before Neolithic agriculture and the corresponding sedentary life style became commonplace.
For most of the early part of this century, the Natufian culture of the Levant and the peoples living in southeastern China a few thousand years before were deemed to the first people with dogs. The Natufian culture sites, which date from 10,000 to 13,000 years ago, are full of dog remains, and these remains particularly influenced Raymond Coppinger, the prominent exponent of the neoteny=domestication hypothesis.
Now as that first decade of this century drew to a close, there were some findings that were beginning to challenge this entire paradigm.
The first of these was the discovery of an anomalous wolf skull from Goyet Cave in Belgium. This skull was initially documented in the nineteenth century, but a 2008 study that included that skull revealed that was actually much more similar to that of a domestic dog. The skull was dated to 31,700 years ago, but when its mtDNA was examine, it was found not to be related to any living wolf or dog. None of the European wolves that were dated to that time period in that study were related to living wolves or dogs (at least in terms of their mtDNA).
Many researchers simply chalked up the Goyet Cave ”dog” to another anomalous wolf.
Then, in 2011, another dog-like skull was found found in Razboinichya Cave in the Altai Mountains of Russia. It was dated to 33,000 years ago. This animal was deemed an “incipient dog,” which the researchers believed was just an early attempt at dog domestication which then had to be abandoned when the last glacial maximum forced humans to give up keeping pets.
Of course, this finding came out at about the same time Mark Derr’s How the Dog Became the Dog came out. Derr’s book was the first really cogent critique of the neoteny=domestication hypothesis, and it also tried to tie together all the various bits of genetic and archaeological and paleontological data into a coherent synthesis. In the book, Derr pointed to a recent genome-wide analysis that had suggested that the Middle East wast he primary source for most modern dogs, but he also posited that Central Asia would be the place where one would find the most morphologically distinct dogs. Derr contends that the Middle Eastern wolves followed humans out of the Middle East into Central Asia, where they mixed with those tamed wolves belonging to people from other parts of the world. Here, tame wolves were exchanging genes with each other and were not regularly incorporating the genes of wild wolves, and over time, this population of wolves began to look more distinct.
In case you hadn’t noticed, the Altai Mountains are in Central Asia, and when I sent a link to the study to Mark Derr, he was quite excited.
But the main paradigm suggested that this animal was nothing more than a relic of an early attempt at domestication.
Until this week.
That’s because ta portion of the Razboinichya Cave dog’s DNA was examined and compared to that of dogs and wolves, including 35 prehistoric New World canids.
It found that the Razboinichya Cave dog was actually more closely related to the pre-Columbian and modern domestic dogs.
So this animal actually was a very early domestic dog.
In Mark Derr’s analysis of the study, he points out that the dog was not related to the wolves living in that part of Central Asia, which means that it may have derived from wolves that were brought there by people.
It does not negate the finding that the bulk of modern domestic dog genetic diversity comes from the Middle East, but it does provide evidence that the place where dogs began to become distinct from wolves was in Central Asia.
But it also shows that dogs were domesticated long before the Neolithic.
The dog is a product of the ancient hunter-gatherer societies of Eurasia.
It is not a creature that evolved on the scrap heap.
It is one that evolved with hunting-gathering man, most likely participating in the hunt, hauling huge slabs of meat, and guarding camp sites from all sorts of fell beasts.
This ancient dog from the Altai Mountains is the oldest domestic animal on record.
Humans and dogs have been at it a long time.
It’s only now that we have proof it’s been this long.
Very interesting. The new twist in the domestication saga is that analysis of the dog genome indicates that dogs have a genetic marker that is related to the ability to digest carbohydrates which distinguishes them from wolves.
Covered it:
http://retrieverman.net/2013/01/23/dogs-have-evolved-to-eat-grains/
Fascinating! I have GOT to read Derr’s work.
That blooping sound you hear is the cringing garbage dump scavenger domestication ‘theory’ going down the toilet.
Beautiful post Scottie-your best ever in my opinion. It is a very neat synopsis of much of what has been said before, plus a little extra. Its posts like this that keep people coming back again and again.
Since the late 60s (high school days) I have professed a belief that the dog was domesticated much longer ago than was currently accepted. I could not see humans who lived by hunting, and living in close proximity to wolves being oblivious to the worth they’d have as hunting partners. Since modern humans are at least 100,000 years old, I feel they (we) started hunting with wolves as soon as we migrated into an area where they were found. Were there wolves in Northern Africa before our ancestors migrated out? This is quite probable, since the Ethiopian Jackal has now been found to be a Canis lupus subspecies. But wherever the first groups of humans teamed up with wolves, I believe it was much longer ago than the accepted date of 14,000 years ago (accepted when I was growing up), or even the more recent dates of 33,000 years ago.
I believe the main problem of dating the first domestication of the dog rests on the fact that archeologists are looking for changes in wolf phenotype as an indication of domestication. Signs like smaller heads, smaller teeth, shorter muzzles and legs, and reduced size in general. But if the wolves that would eventually evolve into dogs were hunting side by side (or ahead of) primitive humans who were living rugged and dangerous lives themselves, why would their wolves/dogs change physically from the wild wolves they were descended from? Wouldn’t a “tame” canid hunting large ungulates need just as much size, power and intelligence as a wild wolf, even if it was hunting in conjunction with humans? I believe (with no formal education or degrees to back up anything I say or believe) that humans hunting large game with nothing more than a stone tipped spear needed nothing more or less than a pack of wolves to increase their hunting success.
Ray Coppinger’s scorn of the “hunting with wolves” theory is backed up by his statement that when he hunts rabbits with beagles he can’t kill enough rabbits to feed both himself and his dogs. I drew up a mathematical formula comparing calories spent vs. calories taken in by 8 primitive men and 8 wolves/dogs hunting rabbits vs. the same men and wolves/dogs hunting something like a moose. True, if this group of primitive men had wasted their time and energies hunting rabbits with their wolves they would suffer a calorie deficit, but if they specialized in hunting large ungulates, with each kill they would harvest many times the calories spent on the hunt. They would have enough excess calories to take plenty back to their camp.
Another point in favor of men and wolves hunting together is the way wolves take large ungulates. In his book, ’The Wolf’, L. David Mech states that of 131 moose detected by wolves, 36 “stood at bay” and were not killed. Though he doesn’t claim definitively that a moose that stands its ground and fights the wolves will be abandoned, on pages 205 through 220 he does seems to infer wolves will usually abandon any moose aggressive enough to stand at bay to look for easier prey, preferring to attack moose that choose to run.
Yet I would think that humans wielding nothing more than heavy, hand-held spears (as opposed to throwing atlatls) would need just the opposite to be routinely successful at hunting big game. A group of humans would need a moose to stand its ground in order to get close enough to it to stab it with their spears.
So if wolves need a prey animal such as an auroch, wisent, moose, or perhaps even an eland at the beginning of the partnership, to run in order to successfully attack it, and humans needed a prey animal to stand in one spot long enough for them to get close enough to get their spears into it, I would think the two species hunting together would be a win-win situation. In Mech’s example, wolves detected 131 moose, yet succeeded in killing only 7. But if they had been hunting in conjunction with spear-wielding humans they might have also been able to take those additional 36 moose that stood at bay. That’s quite a difference in success rates. Mech also states that most of the moose detected in that study were discovered by scent, something primitive humans must have found very handy.
So perhaps humans were domesticating wolves much longer ago than is thought, but instead of choosing physical freaks to breed from, they simply chose the animals that better responded to their commands; better hunting partners. Perhaps 80,000 years ago humans had dogs that were as trainable as dogs are today, yet were still “wolves” physically; so wolf-like that their fossils cannot be distinguished from wild wolves. Maybe it wasn’t until the advent of agriculture that dogs began to look like we “expect” dogs to look, and developed things like a tolerance for grains in their diets. The “dogs” were actually there all along, they just didn’t look like dogs.
DAC
Scandinavian style of hunting moose don’t differ too much from the primitive hunt, I don’t think.
Then you have people who couldn’t afford to buy rifles:
https://fbcdn-sphotos-g-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-snc6/185443_149025461845427_1038125_n.jpg
https://fbcdn-sphotos-g-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash4/428076_2719325154383_1790368050_n.jpg
“I believe the main problem of dating the first domestication of the dog rests on the fact that archeologists are looking for changes in wolf phenotype as an indication of domestication. Signs like smaller heads, smaller teeth, shorter muzzles and legs, and reduced size in general”
Yep, I’d say this was a classic case of allowing theory to lead the data rather than the reverse. They went into this “knowing” that domesticated dogs would have these features and would thus be phenotypically distinct from local wolf populations.
I have always had a theory that one of the reasons modern humans beat out Neanderthals is that the modern human had the canine and Neanderthals didn’t. It isn’t a theory with any serious evidence, but it could be proven or disproven at some point. The scavenger theory folk haven’t quite given up yet — I read just the other day yet another post elsewhere that posited that dogs weren’t used for hunting because the hunting dog is only a “leisure animal”. I suppose the only hunting dog they are familiar with is the specialized pointers, retrievers, etc or “hunting hounds” of the “middle ages” nobility. Certainly not the early type setters that were used to find birds so people could net them and certainly not the far far more early hunting dog that basically helped herd/chase prey into waiting ambush by hunters using nets or spears. For that kind of dog, you don’t need much more than an animal that will more or less come when called and bark or make noise & chase /startle prey in the right direction.
Mark Derr pointed out that Neanderthals co-existed with dog-wolves before Cro-Magnon did in his most recent book.
Neanderthals are another whole can of genetic/historic worms to add into the already particularly vermicular vessel of modern human and dogs.
Can you give me a brief synopsis of Derr’s thoughts on Neanderthals and dog-wolves, please? The latest studies suggest Neanderthal’s died out in Europe 50,000 years ago rather than the previously estimated 35,000, so that could be interesting if he’s not dealt with it in the book.
A symbiotic relationship with wolves would have been particularly useful for the early human species carving out a hunter gatherer living in Europe and beyond. Both species were certainly intelligent and adaptable enough to figure out that they could bring down megafauna co-operatively with less personal risk of death and more success than individually. It’s a possible scenario and if that ever did happen, maybe it was the Neanderthals that we came into contact with when modern humans left Africa that introduced us to the concept of hunting with dogs and having them round our camps as predator alarms etc… We certainly interacted, cross bred and according to some theories totally integrated our Neanderthal cousins into the modern human gene pool. So we must have swapped items, customs and concepts as well as DNA.
The points he brought up in the book. He didn’t outright say that Neanderthals domesticated the dogs, but he allowed the debate to have a voice in his book.
Neanderthals hunted seasonally and followed migration routes. Ethologists Wolfgang Schleidt and Michael Shalter proposed they followed the wolves and learned the game-trails.
Neanderthals became the apex predators 130 000 years ago then went extinct 30 000 years ago. Date for earliest mtDNA for the first dogs was 135 000 years ago. Humans left Africa 15 000 years ago; and 30 000 to 27 000 years ago, by the same team which did the mtDNA sequencing, was calibrated upon genome-sequencing of modern breeds. These datas are inconclusive since there is no evidence suggesting whether or not Neanderthals co-existed with the dog-wolves first, or became extinct with the appearance of the first dogs.
Wolf skeletons have been found in Croatian caves alongside with Neanderthal skeletons. The scavenger hypothesis is doubted because of the absence of Spotted Hyena.
Some archaeologists and the ethologists believe that wolves and Neanderthals hunted together.
The Neanderthals retreated to the Levant ahead of the advancing glaciers in Europe 75 000 to 80 000 years ago. Humans did not push into Europe until 35 000 to 40 000 years ago. The Levant is a site where it is believe modern humans inherited their 1-4% of their genes. The Levant is also the place where most of the genes of modern dogs are inherited from.
Goyet Cave is a site of a major discovery of a skull which is morphologically a dog 31 700 years ago. The river valley where the Goyet Cave is located is also a major centre for Neanderthals. However the Goyet Cave Dog is not genetically related to modern dogs. Also, there is no human remains found with the fossil, so the idea is thrown into doubt.
I forgot about what he said about Homo erectus though since the name popped up a few times in the book.
I was hoping the comments would had allowed ul and li bullet-points. Guess not.
Thank you Dave. I’ve been reading up about Neanderthals all afternoon. Some scientifically up to date sites and some a scary to say the least. I like my nice idealized version of our two human species being the evolutionary equivalent of the dire wolf and the grey wolf. It’s better than them being a large, hairy, stocky, bug eyed, nocturnal people eating chimpanzee that hunted us in the dead of night like one Australian insisted. I get the feeling that just from the differing hunting techniques, the Neanderthals had far more to fear from us than vice versa.
BTW, the recent Oxford Uni study about Neas takes a step back saying they vanished already 45 000 – 50 000 yrs ago from Spain, their last refugee.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2013/feb/04/neanderthals-modern-humans-research
The Neas were closer to the wolves in the way that the women hunted too. Also, their diet consisted clearly more meat than the diet of the hunter-gathers’ of the present day.
Any consideration of the hypothesis that modern humans out-competed Neanderthals because “we” had dogs begs the question, “Why didn’t the Neanderthals have dogs, too?” Since the Neanderthals were intelligent big game hunters living in the territories of (at least the ancestors of) the European wolf, and they and wolves were both hunting similar prey in a similar way. Why wouldn’t they have been hunting together in the same way modern humans were? Why did Cro-Magnon have wolves/dogs and not the humans whose land they were invading?
Could it be that the Neanderthals were hunting with wolves, but the Cro-Magnons just had better wolves/dogs; dogs more trainable than the wolves the Neanderthals were hunting with? I read somewhere of ethologists who discovered a strain of mice that had no fear of open spaces. Most mice will scurry to the wall when placed in the middle of an open room, and will only travel along the walls when they move about the room, never venturing out into the open (where they’d be easy pickings for a hawk or owl). Could it be possible that the founding population of wolves that primarily evolved into the domestic dog was a strain that had a different brain than most wolves; perhaps a less than normal fight or flight reaction? Could they have been a strain that was more tamable and eventually more trainable than normal wolves, and could be more easily assimilated into human society? If this strain of wolves had been the line (family, subspecies, or whatever term one would choose to differentiate them from “other” wolves) of wolves that were the ones to first team up with modern humans, and quickly “evolved” into a more useful “dog”, they could have then accompanied their human “masters” when they migrated into Neanderthal territory.
When Europeans began populating North America there were already several recognized breeds of Native dogs, yet most of those breeds disappeared and (judging from the first photos of Native people compared to pre-photo paintings) were quickly replaced by European breeds. This was probably because the more domesticated (from the “right” strain of wolves) European dogs were simply better dogs. When I compare my wolf-dogs with my wolfhound-malamute crosses, or other pure dogs I have, there is no question of which animals are the “better dogs”. Though my wolf-dogs are beautiful and powerful animals, and would be all I needed if I were forced to survive in a northern forest populated with large ungulates, they would be very poor “dogs”, and not the allies I would need were I to “go to war” with competing humans. If I had lived and hunted (primitively) with nothing but wolf-dogs for my entire life, and then was suddenly given some of my wolfhound-malamute crosses, it would have been like getting out of a horse drawn buggy and into a Jeep. I can run a half dozen of my wolfhounds and wolfhound crosses off leash far easier, and with a hundred times less diligence than I can exercise one of my wolf-dogs. The “dogs” just seem to want to listen to, and please me, the wolf-dogs, while loving and loyal, could care less what I want of them. They are the ultimate “free spirit’, and certainly not a “tool” in the sense so many good dogs are. This may have been the situation Native Americans faced when they compared their dogs to the dogs brought by the Europeans. As they took quickly to so much of what the white man introduced, could they have also found their dogs wanting and began keeping European dogs?
The Native Americans primarily lost their wars to keep their lands through disease and technology. Could Neanderthals have faced a similar situation? Could the first “dogs” have been the greatest technology modern humans brought into Europe? A technology that was so important to everyday survival that when the two human species were faced with competition for existence it tipped the balance for that survival in favor of the invading modern humans?
DAC
“…nd certainly not the far far more early hunting dog that basically helped herd/chase prey into waiting ambush by hunters using nets or spears…”
…or the various hounds, curs, feists, etc. used in the Southern U.S., the Laika’s of Eurasia, the dingos of Australia, or the spitz types dogs of N. Europe, to name a few modern examples. Those folks need to get out more.
interestingly, came across this one today: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/failure-to-hunt-rabbits-part-of-neanderthals–demise-/ which includes the following: “Fa and his team speculate that most of the rabbit hunting among early modern humans may have been done by women and children, who could have stayed behind in settlements while the men went on hunting trips for larger prey.
The women and children “may have specialized in hunting rabbits, by surrounding warrens with nets or smoking the rabbits out of the warren,” Fa said.
Ancient rabbit hunters may also have had help from a four-legged ally picked up during their travels from Africa: dogs” — using beagles as the test is again assuming modern methods are identical to the ancient ones. Driving rabbits into a net would have been much more effective, if less “sporting”. Ditto for even deer (archeological evidence of “corral” and traps for deer and bighorn where animals were driven into a sort of “shooting gallery” is well documented throughout Africa, Europe and the Americas).
Getting a dog to chase prey in the right direction (as in chasing it towards a waiting ambush) really takes a very specialized dog; one that is highly trainable (think a border collie herding sheep), and probably wasn’t a style of hunting utilized by many primitive people until wolves/dogs were well into domestication, and perhaps readily recognizable as dogs. A basically untrained pack of wolves just being a pack of wolves would serve as the perfect hunting dogs for very primitive humans hunting large ungulates. The only difference these wolves would have to exhibit from truly wild wolves would be a tolerance of humans so they didn’t run off when the human hunters moved in to use their spears on the prey the wolves had brought to bay, and thus let the prey escape. Even puppies from the (normally) human shy strains of wild wolves today could be tamed enough to be useful in such a hunt.
DAC
Whenever I picture the early cooperation of humans and wolves I think of odd hunting pairs like badgers and coyotes, bee-eaters and ratels, etc.
Massugu, you hit the nail on the head. Nature is full of examples of two different species taking advantage of each other in order to feed themselves. We see this as working together, whether each species agrees upon the relationship or not, and primitive humans hunting in cooperation with wolves is no more strange than ravens following wolves to scavenge after they make a kill. We have a pair of ravens living in our woods that want to establish that age-old relationship with my dogs and wolf-dogs. I feed them to make up for the lost time they spend sitting above the dogs waiting for them to go kill something, but they really love it when I feed the remains of a butchered beef to the dogs and they actually get to feed like ravens were meant to; right down to eating the bloody snow. I’m sure they go off and follow coyotes, too.
I think it would almost be unnatural if primitive humans didn’t at least follow the tracks of wolf packs in the snow to scavenge off their kills, or to actually drive them off and claim it for themselves. This would eventually lead to some men coming upon a pack holding some giant beast at bay. The men would charge in with spears ready to kill, the wolves would scatter, only to return once the humans had taken all they could hold or carry to clean up the remains. This couldn’t help but lead to some sort of cooperative hunting, even if the wolves weren’t willing participants at first. It would only be a short step from there to wolves actually hunting with and living amongst humans; the first step to domestication so long ago.
DAC
It’s not that hard to get a dog to chase animals “in the right direction”. You take the dog up to the top of the area (arena/ field) opposite of where you want the animals to go. Then let go. If it makes noise at that point, all the better because the intent is to spook stock the direction you want, not for the dog to actually “herd” or round them up. I’ll note however, that as has been mentioned on this blog more than once that it’s been demonstrated possible to actualy herd with modern wolves and coyotes if you get the right individual.
In terms of “spooking stock into a trap”, you actually use what is the opposite for herding — if a dog (or proto dog or tame wolf) is dicerned at the top of your hunting field, the normal prey response is to go ‘the other way’. In fact, it’s the recipe for disaster in many a started dog that they can run the stock into the fence rather than do any kind of “outrun” because they “go straight in” rather than around. The dog only need to be controlled to be quiet until in place to act as a canine “beater” to spook the animals in the desired direction.
I’ve seen many an untrained dog do just this. All you do is set your trap in the site where you know the stock will tend to go (across the natural escape route). If you had a wolf that had “adopted” a person, it would be fairly easy to employ this tactic.
I have trained many farm dogs to herd cattle (though I’ve never done any work on sheep with a Border Collies). It’s always easy to get a dog to herd cattle in the same direction you are going in. You move behind the cattle and the dog moves ahead of you and (if not a totally untrained puppy) obeys your commands and more or less drives the cattle in the direction you want them to go. You should never try to train a dog to herd until it is completely trained to your voice commands, and is consistently responsive to them. I grew up on a farm and once a dog had a routine down it was nothing to send them out to the mountain pastures alone, and have them round up the cattle and bring them in from a mile or more away with no human assistance at all.
But training a dog to actually go out and round up (not just chase) wild stock (not tame sheep that are much less apt to panic and scatter in all directions) is a totally different story. I would assume that to drive wild animals into an ambush you, the “master” of the dog, and thus its pseudo pack, would have to be well away from the dog and in the location of the ambush, and the dog(s) would have to go out on their own and circle the prospective prey animals and drive them back to you. No matter what I’ve read I have never seen any sign of dogs or wolves intelligently working together to drive prey back to a “planned” ambush on their own (when wolves bringing up the rear in a chase see prey animals being chased by the lead wolves change direction and head back towards them, they may hunker down and wait to ambush the returning prey, as dogs may do when playing chase, but this should not be confused with a planned event). To execute any kind of ambush hunt wolves/dogs would have to be working at the command of man and be able and willing to respond to those commands, and at the time period we’re talking about, there would not have been any Border Collies intensively bred for the instincts that make such training possible. I grew up training farm dogs, have worked as a professional guard dog trainer (starting off as the man in the padded suit and worked my way up to handler and then trainer), and can train just about any dog to do just about anything I desire (which is always easier if you choose a breed with a predisposition to do what you want in the first place, which is why you don’t see Blue Tick hounds in sheep dog trials), and have always found getting the dog to do what comes naturally to it ( i.e. driving cattle or sheep ahead of them and you, their “pack”), is much easier than training them to do something they’re not inclined to do naturally, like circling out and around and driving (even tame) cattle back to you where you’re hiding in ambush (not standing out in plain sight calling out or whistling commands).
People watching Border Collies work, or even training Border Collies to herd sheep should realize this is not really normal wolf/dog behavior. I invite anyone who has trained Border Collies to herd sheep and is convinced they were easily trained because of their dog training abilities to take one of my weight-pulling wolf-malamutes and do the same. And my wolf-malamutes are very close to the type of wolf-dog our ancestors would have been working with. They did not have dogs that were the result of hundreds of years of breeding for just that type of behavior. I could hunt moose and other large ungulates with a trio of my wolf-dogs by letting them bring the prey to bay and then moving in and killing it with a spear; I doubt I could ever train them to consistently “herd’ wild prey into an ambush.
As far as this instinct in Border collies goes, for every Border Collie I have seen work impressively with sheep, I have also seen a neurotic Border Collie that would sit by the side the road and spin in furious circles as every car passed, sit by a dripping faucet and make an abortive lunge at every drop that fell, or herded a flock of ducks incessantly around a yard all day long at no one’s bidding. In the right circumstances, the behavior that makes Border Collies so valuable when herding sheep becomes a real pain in the a** when you expect them to be a regular dog.
So I still maintain my first assessment that it is no easy task to train a dog (a primitive wolf/dog; something I assumed we were talking about, and omitted to say before) to herd prey animals into an ambush. It is more than easy to train (allow?) a dog to chase prey ahead of you, just watch the ‘Fenton! Man Chasing Dog Chasing Deer’ video on YouTube. To get them to intentionally turn that prey around and herd them back to you in hiding is an altogether different story.
DAC
“I would assume that to drive wild animals into an ambush you, the “master” of the dog, and thus its pseudo pack, would have to be well away from the dog and in the location of the ambush, and the dog(s) would have to go out on their own and circle the prospective prey animals and drive them back to you. ” — no. Human hunting is a TEAM effort so this would work like “tiger drives” used to in the past. One or more skilled with spear or bow/arrow are at the one end and your noisemakers (women, children, incompetent with the spear AND THE DOG) are at the other. just racing back and forth barking (after all the canid nose is better than the human’s) would be better at spooking stock in the right direction.
as for circling,etc, I don’t do “Border Collies”. I do, however, train and compete wtih Belgian Sheepdogs at the higher levels (several DCs, more HXs, even more WTCH/HTCH dogs.). I would be happy to take your mal X and see if I could spook my sheep (or feral cattle, whatever) in the “right direction” using a line and a dog that was at all interested in “dinner” and would at the most, come more or less to me when called. Given the methodology of many an early dog trainer, and the tendency to “discard if unsuitable” would have resulted in the “right animal” pretty fast.
I certainly could get one of my dogs (untrained other than to come when called) to do the kind of task I’m talking about. For that matter, if the dog is “into the owner” all you do is have someone else in the tribe take it to the set out point and it will drive stock to you even if unintentionally. I’d be happy to show the tactic.
While I hate to get into any kind of debate in these forums, and respect the knowledge everyone has gained from their own experiences, I feel I must reply to this train of thought. I don’t know much about anything, I’m just an old hick from up here in Vermont. And I especially don’t know squat about tiger hunting, except that it must be done quite differently than hunting deer or some other species of ungulates any lower on the violence scale than Cape buffalo.
Here in Vermont we do what are known as “deer drives” to drive white-tailed deer to waiting hunters. We don’t use dogs for this, not only because it’s illegal, but because dogs would be way too fast to slowly drive the deer in the right direction as needed. You actually want the deer to bound ahead of you a short distance, and then stop and look back, wondering just how fast they should be running from the approaching danger. That way you can alter your course and drive them in the direction you want them to go, rather than them just running off as fast as they can and ending up who-knows-where. And if they’re running too fast when they reach the spot where the other hunters on your “team” are waiting in ambush, it makes for difficult shots; and that’s with the hunters using rifles, fast running prey would be even harder to kill if the hunters only had spears or bows and arrows.
On a tiger hunt I would assume you’d want to make all the ruckus you could to keep the tiger from turning around and going back through the line of beaters; possibly attacking some. If I were in that line I’d be banging on something and yelling my ass off. Quite different from hunting ungulates for food, I believe.
As far as herding cattle or deer goes, everything you’ve described could be done without dogs, and perhaps more easily. I no longer hunt, but having hunted all my life, both with and without dogs, I am quite familiar with the circumstances where they are useful, and where they’re just a pain to have around. As far as having someone take the dog out beyond the cattle, sheep or whatever you’re herding/hunting, and letting the dog drive them back to you… if you have some human going out beyond the cattle (or prey animals) in the first place, what do you need the dog for? Just have the human drive the game back like we do with deer (I’m talking actual primitive survival here, not some dog sport).
One of my dogs of long ago, Lobo, a 90 lb. ¾ German shepherd, ¼ Siberian husky, could go out and drive the cattle home from a mile or more away all by himself, but those cattle already knew where they were going; they just needed a little encouraging. One spring a neighboring farmer turned his Ayrshire heifers out to pasture. Ayrshire are a rather nervous breed, and one of the unbred heifers, thus unhindered by the hanging bag and udders a milking cow possess, jumped the fence and ran off into the forest of Buck Mountain, where it soon became quite feral. My best friend and I were 16 year old boys that summer, and we decided we were going to catch that heifer. At the time I had Lobo and King, a 60 lb. dog that looked like an Australian shepherd, and was colored like a typical sable collie. Both were capable cow dogs, King having helped me train Lobo. At the time I also had a mustang horse that was captured wild out west, and had been trucked east where I bought it, and then broke it to ride. For the fun of it I would use that horse to “bulldog” some steers (and one young Holstein bull) we had, like they do in western rodeos. I planned on using that technique to catch that heifer, with my friend using his Morgan-Arabian cross to help herd her into position. But we soon discovered that no matter how sure-footed and fast my mustang was, that heifer was even more so, running over rocky ledges like a goat, and sailing over old fences like a show-jumper, and there was no way I could get close enough to bulldog her without risking breaking my horse’s leg.
I had also developed a technique for bulldogging steers while on foot. When we had to catch a steer, a couple of my (human) friends would drive the steers past the corner of a barn where I’d be hiding on the other side (we just couldn’t get those dogs to herd those half wild steers past that corner on their own, though they happily accompanied my friends, but had to be held back verbally), and when the steer we wanted passed the corner I would run out and bulldog it (luckily all our steers had horns), and hold it down until someone vaccinated it, treated a wound, or got a halter and rope on it so we could manually drag it into a waiting truck. So we decided to try to use that method to catch the heifer, but instead of hiding around the corner of a barn, I was going to use King and Lobo to catch the heifer and bring her to bay, and then rush in and bulldog her (kinda like our primitive ancestors would have used wolves to get a spear into aurochs and moose and other game).
But things didn’t work out as planned, and though we were able to track down and bring the heifer to bay several times, she’d become so wild that as soon as she saw my friend and me approach she’d break away from the dogs and run off through the cedar swamps where she always preferred to turn at bay and fight the dogs (she had a good set of horns, too). Though both these dogs were great “cow dogs”, and could always be trusted to bring in the cows when the cows basically knew where they were supposed to go, and would turn those cattle this way and that if I gave them the command, there was no way I could have ever trained them to go out on their own drive that wild heifer back to me while I was hiding in ambush. All they were ever able to do was chase her away from us as fast as she could run after I’d kept them close to my side as we tracked her down. She just wouldn’t cooperate. She’d eventually wear us (the humans) out, and I’d have to call the dogs off and end the hunt. After we’d failed to catch her this way a half dozen times we were so frustrated that we even threatened to get our deer rifles and just shoot her for the beef, but technically she was still our neighbor’s property, so we wouldn’t do that. We kept hunting her until winter set in, but never caught her.
And our inability to catch that heifer wasn’t because my dogs were inferior animals; Lobo was about as physically capable as any dog I’ve ever known. One morning the winter following our unsuccessful heifer hunts, I went out to do the chores and found Lobo on the back porch covered with blood and bloated with a large meal. I couldn’t figure out what he had gotten into, but there was fresh snow on the ground and his tracks led down our long driveway from the barns. When I got to the barns the snow of the barn yard was churned to mud with cattle tracks (mixed with Lobo’s own). Worried, I quickly did a head count of our cattle and found them all there, so I went to the neighbors and checked their small herd of Black Angus. When I saw nothing was missing there, I went back to our farm and started searching amongst the tracks in our barnyard. I first discovered where a lone cow had come up a tractor road into our barnyard from the corn fields below the barns, and then found where the tracks finally left the barnyard and went down a slope to where an old hay barn had collapsed years before, and the beams lay scattered across each other under the snow. There I found the Ayrshire heifer bogged down with her legs tangled in the beams and her throat ripped out. An arch of blood had stained the snow four feet or more from her neck, and Lobo had eaten the meat on one side of her neck from jaw to shoulder.
What had happened was immediately clear; once winter set in the heifer had apparently found finding enough to eat on the mountain too hard to endure, and came down to the lower pastures and crop land. She eventually smelled the hay we fed our pastured cattle, and came up the tractor road into our barnyard. Lobo, patrolling the farm as he always did, discovered her and either recognized her as the one he’d chased all spring, summer and fall, or more likely, just started chasing her like he did our steers when they’d get out of their pasture. The steers knew where they belonged, and always jumped the fence to get back into their pasture when Lobo chased them, and as soon as they were back in the pasture he’d stop chasing them. But this heifer didn’t know that routine, so she just ran around and around the barnyard with Lobo chasing her until she saw what appeared to be a clear section of snow covered ground leading back down to the wide open spaces of the (harvested) corn fields. When she dove over the bank she was quickly trapped in the fallen beams and Lobo went in for the kill, ripping out her jugular vein. So Lobo was a fast, powerful and very capable dog with a strong prey drive, and would certainly have had no trouble herding that wild heifer up on Buck Mountain if it were that simple to herd a wild animal, even something as imperfectly wild as a feral heifer of a dairy breed. I’m not sure if Lobo would have ever killed one of our steers if it refused to get back into the pasture, but I know we could leave him in the cow barn all night while a cow gave birth and he’d never touch cow or calf.
I’d love to have you take one of my wolf x malamutes and try to train it to herd; not just chase prey animals, any dog will do that, but to actually herd animals under your control and at your command. Once again, I feel what you seem to be referring to as “herding” is nothing more than what’s happening in that YouTube video, ‘Fenton! Man Chasing Dog Chasing Deer’. By my definition, that’s not herding, that’s just a dog chasing deer while its owner is trying his best to call it back with no effect; as far as I’m concerned, something like that would be useless when trying to drive a herd of wild ungulates to a waiting ambush unless you started them down a canyon first, or if they were already in the habit of running down a certain path. You mention you could certainly get one of your dogs (untrained other than to come when called) to herd, but anyone I know who trains cattle dogs knows the primary thing your dog has to know before starting in at herding is to come back when called, even when potential prey is running away ahead of it. So an animal “untrained except to come when called” is no untrained, primitive dog, and I could herd cattle moving ahead of me with any dog that just knows that; the rest is just perfection. I’m sure your Belgian sheepdogs are better trained than that, but I assumed we were originally talking about Primitive Man hunting with tame wolves. How many years do you figure it took Mankind to work with wolves (selectively breeding, even if not intentionally) before the wolf became “the dog” enough to “come when called” when it was chasing some prey animal? Most people still can’t depend on their dogs doing that today.
So I must maintain my claim that it is no easy task to train a (primitive) dog to go out (by itself, not accompanied by one or more humans) and circle prey and drive them back to a waiting hunter.
If interested, watch some videos of hog hunters using dogs; I believe that’s the way primitive man hunted with wolves.
DAC
The above commenters are right on. Problem with science types/researchers is that while they may be great with dates, genomes, molecular studies and such, they don’t have near as much real understanding of dogs as Dog, so to speak.
One author has written on development of the symbiotic relationship of domestic animals and man: “The Covenant of the Wild” by Stephen Budiansky. It’s been some years since I read it, now I’m thinking to dig it out and read it again..
a much earlier date may be possible. Can anyone disprove the hypothesis that even the Australopithicenes cooperated with wolves in the hunt?
Why not, it was the stye of social hunting more than anything else that likely brought the two species into regular contact.
Apes are really witty and great robbers. Sometimes too witty and take stupid risks. So I think it started really long ago. Jane Goodall tells how chimps scream like crazyes when they happen to get meat somehow.
So, that’s the base how wolves and early homos may have interacted as first.
Australopithecus was quite small, his tools were poor. He may have well tested, as a big group, sometime to harash smaller beasts, like wolves, from their kill for to steal their meat.
Since male Australopithecus were nearly 50% bigger than females, this suggests strong selection to the more powerful type, with better hunting abilities. Also, from that time on, towards Erectus (1,8mya), the brain stated to grow and demanded lots of protein.
http://peninkulmilla.wordpress.com/2013/03/09/loki-153-kun-ihminen-petojen-karjaa-varasti-erectus-steals-easy-meat-from-wolves/
Some hunter gatherer tribes still around now steal kills from wild dogs and even lions.
I wonder how far past that point on the road of wolves becoming dogs it progressed with Neanderthals. We differ genetically from them by only a tiny amount. Some of the genomic differences we have to Neanderthals affect things like hair, sweat glands, head morphology and extra cognitive ability. I wonder if the Eurasian wolves underwent a similar change too from their ancestors who were contemporary with Neanderthals? Smaller, faster prey species taking over from the megafauna might lead to the selection of lighter, faster and possibly slightly more mentally flexible, less aggressive gray wolves in at least some areas our ancestors were. That would have made it far easier for both modern humans and wolves to have got beyond “some days you steal the wolf’s dinner and some days it steals your dinner”.
Great post! My own research has led me to believe that dogs began the road to domestication about 200,000 ya. By the time we see skulls and paw prints identifying proto-dogs or dogs. there were untold years of genetic mutations leading to a separate species from wolves. Homo sapiens appeared 200,000 ya. Their attempts at hunting big game attracted smaller wolves who found an easier way of getting meat than chasing herds of ungulates for miles and then going though the hassle of bringing down the prey and getting it back to the den. Instead, proto dogs could follow humans & when they wounded an ungulate–but didn’t manage always to kill it with their spears–the wolf/dog, using its superior olfactory prowess–would sniff out where the wounded animal had gone to cover. Then, their barking would attract the humans, who would kill it with their knives (which they had) and, of course, share the meat with the wolf/dogs. To this day, hunting dogs bark for humans to come once the dog has flushed the game. That’s one thing wolves don’t do. They don’t bark to announce where their prey is. But, every hunting dog I’ve ever seen, does.
I think, from the outset on their way to becoming dogs, wolves–and later dogs-have been brilliant in figuring out what they could do to make humans want to keep them around. Getting humans to feed them was a lot easier than hunting in wolf packs. The bonus was that dogs were capable of genuinely loving humans and wanted very much to please humans. That. of course, was one feature of wolf love for the pack. Dogs just transferred that love to people.
BTW, have you read the studies that show that the human brain has shrunk in the past 100,000+ years? Apparently, by letting dogs act as ears and noses, human brains could shrink & also let the older olfactory and audio human brain areas get freed up for more complex thinking. My next blog post on http://dogsandwollves-smartoldlady.blogspot.com will discuss how dogs helped human evolution along.
****That’s one thing wolves don’t do. They don’t bark to announce where their prey is. But, every hunting dog I’ve ever seen, does.****
Sighthounds hunt in total silence, from search to kill. So do many varmint-killing terriers. A hound or a terrier held back from the hunt may yodel & carry on due to excitement & frustration, but they don’t make a peep in the field. Not all hunting dogs are bay dogs.
Actually, terriers often bark if their quarry is cornered and they can’t kill it. You see this with treeing dogs or earth-dogs. They don’t make a kill, but they will bark out of frustration of not being able to kill.
A good coyote- or wolf-hound would bark while on the rig letting the owners know they have sighted a wild canid before being released.
Branigan, my male Irish wolfhound barks “tree” when he’s treed a squirrel, or has a rat or chipmunk cornered under a brush pile. He will even tear chunks of bark off the tree with his teeth like some really determined coon hounds will. Boudicca, my female Irish wolfhound has a very hound-like voice that she’ll use when she’s chasing the other dogs in play, especially Grizzly, one of my Alaskan malamute – Irish wolfhound crosses who is so fast she doesn’t stand a chance of catching him. Though she totally ignores my chickens, she chases gold fish eating great blue herons off our pond and barks as she does so. She’ll pretty much roar at them as they soar overhead. Grizzly on the other hand is almost totally silent; not even whining when he asks to go out. To ask to go out he’ll just stand and look me intently in the eye, or nudge me under the arm if I’m sitting, or hand if I’m standing to let me know it’s particularly urgent.
DAC
You’re right! I forgot about sighthounds. But, and I may be misinformed, Sight Hounds don’t kill the prey. They silently point towards it so as not to arouse the prey. I’ve seen a pointer literally freeze while pointing so that hunters can come in for the kill.
Sight hounds are dogs like greyhounds and wolfhounds; they were probably the first type of dog to be developed from the wolf. Sight hounds are the fastest breeds of dogs, and run down their prey by sight, and either kill it themselves, or hold it down or at least in place until their masters catch up and kill it.
Pointers are a relatively modern breed that more or less fall into the “hunting for pleasure” group of dogs. They are very specialized dogs and are a type of bird/gun dog, not a sight hound.
DAC
Yes, pointers are a very different type of dog than a sighthound. To the layperson they somewhat resemble each other in body shape with the deep chest & long legs, but a pointer is a much more heavily built dog with a less flexible spine & with nowhere near the same kind of speed & chase instinct.
If pointers are not trained to hold their points, they will hunt like a normal dog. What you wind up with is a flushing dog that shows a lot more stalking behavior before it flushes. The Germans have a more than a half dozen “pointers” that do far more than just point.
I know little about pointers. I’m sure there are a number of varieties I’ve never heard of, but when I think “pointer” I think German shorthair or English. I don’t know how much of a pointers “pointing” is training and how much is involuntary behavior, but when I was a child a friend’s family had a pointer (I believe it was a German shorthair) that would freeze and “point” at the drop of a hat, and it had never been trained at all. It wouldn’t just point starlings, pigeons and other common birds, but butterflies, fluttering leaves, cats, you name it. It seemed to spend half its time frozen in a point. We (8 year old) kids thought it was hilarious and would amuse ourselves by shoving it sideways as it pointed so it had to sidestep to keep from falling over. That dog must have had an amazingly strong genetic predisposition to point.
DAC
The pointing is natural. It’s just holding it for extended periods of time that requires training. The point is just a stalking behavior that has been exaggerated through selective breeding. Most dogs will do the stalking, but they won’t freeze.
Untrained German wire-hair:
Elaine, Pointers work with they great nose, not sight.
Oh indeed they do! They run it down & kill it stone dead. They’re catch dogs for the most part, not bay dogs. There is some variation of course, like when sighthounds are used on big game like wolves or boar, but even then they’re usually worked in a pack & they attack & hold the prey, not corner it & yell at it.
I think the primitive dogs seem to have a balanced multi sensory hunting style. I notice that the Basenji is attracted by movement, yet is readily switching to sound and sent on the wind or ground. The breed charateristically follows a zigzag pattern when tracking by sent. While they provide direction to the trail of the hunt they also bait and harass the prey. Hungry basenji will kill and consume the soft parts first. In native Africa the breed is usually the tracker and baiter for the human to kill the prey. The good canine hunter will usually get the innerds and the remains of the cooking pot fare. Any other protein is gotten from rats and small game in the area surrounding the village. I could see the same routine played out with the hunters of the neolithic period.
Out west, sighthounds are used to kill coyotes–I don’t think they bother to point them first.
I am writing a book on dogs, and I agree they became human companions far earlier than i generally believed. Like you, I think some wolves started on the road to dogdom over 100,000 years ago–maybe even before humans were Homo sapiens. Homo erectus, who lived 2,000,000 ya already was making cutters to scavenge carcasses. Derek Bickerton’s excellent book on the evolution of language explains why scavengers would have developed language (see the post on evolution of language in http://smarthotoldlady.blogspot.com) Wolves predate hominids by at lest 4,000,000 years, so when hominids were scavenging with tools, wolves may have been around. Even at that early date, enterprising wolves might have followed Homo erectus to their campsites to grab an easy meal of bones and offal that hominids didn’t eat. Then, when hominids became hunters, wolves would have followed them and,, when the hominids injured an animal, the wolves would smell where it had gone to cover, and barked–just as most hunting dogs today do when they have cornered prey.
Wolves don’t share their prey with any creature except for their denmates. If a hominid tried to snatch a wolf’s kill–or the the prey the wolf was herding back to its den–the wolf would have killed them. So, it had to be wolves who initiated finding prey & letting humans know where it was so they could kill it. The reward for the wolf, of course, is that this was easier than chasing a herd for up to 30 miles before cutting out a victim to take back to the den, dead or alive. Even killing a large herd animal took a lot of strength and work on the wolf’s's part. Those wolves that figured out that it was a lot easier to let humans do the actual killing, were brilliant. That started a very profitable partnership for both species.
As for dog brains being smaller than wolf brains, that’s a fallacious measure. It’s not sheer size of the brain that counts. In fact, the larger the brain the more calories the mammal has to consume just to live. Dog brains were rearranged as they evolved from wolves. One of the first clues is that the dog skull is domed. That is, dogs have an equivalent to the human forehead. The reason that’s important is the same reason that homnid’s gettting foreheads was: enlarging the brain itself is metabolically inefficient and, i the case of humans, it would have gotten so large, they could’t have stood up. The dog brain is 85% neocortex, which is an impressive ratio. Since there was a clear advantage to a dog’s being smaller than a wolf, the dome in the skull provided room for the expansion of neocortex: where the skills required for social interactions plus solving new problems are. Wolves only had to have social skills with other wolves. Dogs, however, needed to retain social skills for interacting with other dogs, but,, even more, they needed far, far more to communicate with and figure out humans. As Adam Mikilosi says, “All dogs are bilingual.” Dogs, when you consider what they do for humans, are amazing. Wolves are awesome but preoccupied only with their own species
Just one small comment. All great data and information! But, about wolves sharing with none other than den-mates…. Wolves wariness and fear have brought them a long way. My husband cut the head off of a wolf-killed deer in Northern Minnesota, feeling eyes upon him and seeing tracks in the snow. Came back 2 hours later and their was nothing left except the stomach. The wolves “decided” to “share” rather than face a greater “perceived” danger. This wasn’t “generosity”, as sharing with pups might be considered, just smart. A perfect possible scene from ancient history.
Basenjis don’t bark, it’s one of the most primitive breeds as You naturally know.
Retrievers mostly don’t bark (yes you can hunt with a Lab too, my Lab caught some rabbits and hares when young and slim).
Nothern Laikas don’t bark – or some do, some don’t.
People bred many Nothern Spitzes to bark, but I have Carl von Linne’s note from the use of Lappish bear hunting dog, who was NOT allowed to bark.
The herders barked, I think it started like that. People start to bred barking dogs to hunt.
“Retrievers mostly don’t bark” Huh?
They aren’t very easy to get barking on the hunt. They will bark in other contexts, such as when the Untermenschen known as coyotes are howling nearby.
Retrievers have been selected to be quiet when working ever since the concept of “retrieving dog” began. In British retriever trials, a dog that even squeaks when under judgement is severely penalized.
Eleine,
>>>Their attempts at hunting big game attracted smaller wolves who found an easier way of getting meat>>>>>>
How about wice versa – wolves were smallish beast among the megafauna of 1mya, when a cavehyena weighted 120kg. So it could have been very easy for humans to suprise a feeding pack and steel their kill. We know that even chimps are witty great robbers, sometimes even risking too much . .
At least see the great video at the end
http://peninkulmilla.wordpress.com/2013/03/09/loki-153-kun-ihminen-petojen-karjaa-varasti-erectus-steals-easy-meat-from-wolves/
Great video. Predators can’t afford to get injured if they can help it, so even a small group of men carrying spears could chase larger predators off their prey. The men in the video were carrying only bows and arrows and knives, but the lions had obviously been conditioned to give up their prey with no fight, and they still got a meal in the end. This scenario was probably played out millions (and millions) of times in our species history.
DAC
I’m sure this was the “meat bar” for the early Homo and the start to get more and more involved with each others’ useful habits. People stole the meat, and wolves came to the camp when they smelled a roasted meat. So it worked bi-mutually.
If you think how fast you can get meat by only following wolves’ tracks and steal from them, maybe you succeed to kill a wolf or two, too.
Wolves hang out near humans, and people liked to live near to wolves because of that meat thing, and because of that they have a common enemy, cavehyena.
Ah, my sentence about the hyena went a bit wrong, but you know wad I mean, the wolves were not the king on the hill like later was. At that time, it may occured that people heard wolves BARKING, if one of them were caught by those larger predators of that time.
Hear an Arabian Wolf barking just like a dog. They do howl, too (unlike the postman of the video claims):
NOTE : NOT FOR SENSITIVE – THE WOLF IS IN TRAPS
I have a recording made years ago in Yellowstone that records wolves barking. In general, they don’t bark when they find prey because the pack is already THERE. On the other hand the “bark at intruders/ please come and help” IS a bark known in wolves and recorded. I think the bark and “sounding” typical of treeing dogs is basically a variant of that. The dogs have been selected to sound off to bring in the rest of the “pack” — the human — to help dispatch the trapped prey. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGJoACEi-8A and this one:
http://vimeo.com/53969
Brad Anderson has done a post on treeing behaviour:
http://www.bradanderson.org/blog/2012/03/behavioral-confirmation-treeing/
Way to go for dogs. I’ve heard they’ve been evolving and honing their skills (owing to our intervention) for almost as long as we’ve been doing the same. Anybody see that Nova doc some years back tracing how dogs evolved from wolves? Like the above article, they mention Eurasia/Central Asia, but don’t say much about specific evolutionary details. Perhaps because none exists just now. I do wonder if all this research into their developmental history will shed light on the psyche of individual breeds. Some are, quite frankly, more befuddling than wild wolves.