Natural History

The skull of a 4,000 year-old dog has been used to reconstruct what its head may have looked like.

The dog was quite wolf-like and described by the BBC as being about “the size of a large collie.” In the UK, “collie” almost always refers to border collies, so this dog probably would have been on the large side of a medium-sized dog.

The dog’s skull was found at Cuween Hill Chambered Cairn on on Mainland, Orkney, off the northern coast of Scotland. 3D images of the skull were use to make the reconstruction, which was created in clay. The artist then made the fur look like that of a European wolf, which is not entirely unreasonable given the morphology of the skull itself.

The dog may have been used to tend sheep or guard settlements. It was clearly a respected creature in the society that interred in the tomb. Maybe it was a valued working animal or simply a totem of its people.

Whatever it was, it was clearly more wolf-like that one might have expected from a dog from this late a date. The Ancient Egyptians, who were contemporaries of these Orkney cairn tomb builders, were already breeding dogs that were quite distinct from wolves.

But the truth of the matter is that this dog was significantly smaller than most modern and contemporary European wolves, and the mainland of Scotland was full of wolves that were probably still interbreeding with domestic dogs on occasion at this time.

So the Orkney Islanders from 4,000 years ago clearly had dogs, but I imagine this dog as being something like a Norwegian elkhound, a laika, or one of the old German herding dogs, like the Thuringian sheepdog.

I would love to see more reconstructions from ancient dogs skulls.  I would love to see the Goyet Cave canid and the Razboinichya Cave “dog” undergo a similar reconstruction.

Yes, this is art, but it is art that is informed through science.