The theory that wolves were the first pastoralists is quite interesting.
I looked at that particular study a few weeks ago.
There is some evidence for it in the historical and anthropological literature.
There are people who rely upon caribou/reindeer herds throughout the northern parts of Eurasia and North America. The Eurasians use herding spitzes to manage their herds of semi-domesticated cervids, while in North America, the deer following Inuit called the Ihalmiut had a very special relationship with the wolf.
That’s actually what this book is about. According to their mythology, the wolf was given to them by a deity to cut out the sick and weak caribou from the herds. Northern people who are living on low carbohydrate diets need quite a bit of fat in their meat, and if the caribou become sickly, they cannot function very well. If the wolves take out the sick and the weak, then the remaining caribou can grow strong and fat.
There is also this book (which I have not read but definitely will) about the complex relationship between the pastoral Mongolians and the wolves– it is both a foe and a totemic animal. When the Chinese government sends forth Han farmers to teach “civilization” to the nomads, they exterminate the wolf and force the pastoralist Mongolians into collective farms.
I am one of these people who doesn’t believe most horry horror tales about wolves, but I am also not one to overly sentimentalize them. Wolves are victimized species. There are very few places where they can live as they once did, and man has come up with all sort of imaginative ways to kill them. As a result, the only wolves left are descended from the wildest and most nervous animals that were left after centuries of persecution. As a result, their behavior may be quite different from what it was before our species decided to call them enemies of the people and revel in their destruction.
In some ways, wolf hating is a symbolic move away from the pastoral and hunter-gatherer cultures, which our species knew through most of its history on this planet, to the agrarian and then industrial cultures we have known in more recent eras. These cultures were originally based upon widespread grain production and the private ownership of livestock. If a wolf killed your sheep, it was your sheep it killed. If a wolf killed your animal, you were one animal behind, and this just wasn’t acceptable.
It is also possible that the development of feudalism in Europe was hastened by a creating wolf paranoia. Tell the peasants that the wolves will get them in the forest, and they will stay to the subinfeudated to the manor for the rest of their lives.
And so the wolf was demonized. And so the wolf was changed.
And thus, we’ll never know what the real relationship between ancient humans and wolves was like. But I think Mark Derr is getting us closer to possibly understanding it.
