Culture
Can we please give the Dog its due
Pandrang Row
Dec 09, 2014, 03:50 PM | Updated Feb 10, 2016, 05:12 PM IST
Save & read from anywhere!
Bookmark stories for easy access on any device or the Swarajya app.
Recent research shows that a crucial reason why Homo Spaiens survived and came to dominate the planet was it made friends with dogs. Yes, our ancestors—and you—owed their lives to the forefathers of that dog you just kicked.
Every Indian city has them. Every Indian city ignores them or treats them as a nuisance to be either ignored or disposed of. They are treated with incredible cruelty—abandoned on the roads, beaten, strangled, poisoned, killed, trained to be killers and put into fighting rinks against stronger and more vicious opponents. Yet they show immense faith in us. They still trust Homo sapiens—their killers and tormentors. They are Canis lupus familiaris, the domestic dog.
We forget that at one time, these creatures that governments and politicians think of today as totally dispensable were totally indispensable. In fact, they were vital to the very survival of humanity. “Dog history is really the history of the partnership between dogs and human beings,” writes Pat Shipman, an anthropologist at Penn State University. He writes,“Animals were not incidental to our evolution into Homo sapiens — they were essential to it. They are what made us human.”
The relationship between human beings and dogs probably started because Homo sapiens were messy, littering creatures (nothing much has changed).
Stanley Coren, a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, Canada, in his latest book, The Modern Dog: A Joyful Exploration of How We Live With Dogs Today, says, “We know that early man was a bit of slob. Body parts which weren’t used for food, and other trash, were put outside the human settlement. The wolf-like ancestors of today’s dogs hung around for scraps. Over time, they began to consider the fringes of human settlements as their territories, and defended them. They also warned one another of danger, and in doing so, warned people who lived in these settlements.”
So, as is the case today, dogs congregated around these piles of delicious garbage. They saw humans as a source of food and were appropriately grateful.
Then, Coren writes, “As the Ice Age came, Cro-Magnons invented the bow and arrow. But the bow and arrow didn’t usually kill, so to efficiently hunt, you had to pursue the prey. That’s where dogs came in, as they helped to pursue the prey and to pull it down. Meanwhile, the Neanderthals were having difficulty even finding large prey, which was also dying out because of the Ice Age.”
Human beings also needed help with herding since, practically, every creature on earth moves faster than we do. Finally, early man needed an early alarm system of predators (human or otherwise).
Of course, there is the companionship and unconditional love dogs give us. What’s interesting is that dogs do more than make you feel good; they are actually good for you. Petting a familiar and friendly dog slows down your heart rate, your breathing becomes more regular and your muscles relax. What’s more, recent research shows that this is a two-way street; dogs experience the same health benefits when we pet them! “Dogs are instant Prozac,” Coren writes. “Dogs also dissolve stress. That means a longer life, maybe.”
So, in addition to the food, dogs also got companionship, protection and shelter out of the deal.
When exactly this partnership began has been a matter of some controversy. However, the latest view, based on evidence from the Goyet Cave in Belgium, the Chauvet Cave in France, and Predmosti in the Czech Republic, is that humans began domesticating dogs as long as 35,000 years ago.
Recent genome research shows strong evidence that European Palaeolithic dogs were domesticated. The oldest, most concrete evidence for a broader working relationship was found at the Bonn-Oberkassel site and dates back 14,000 years. The earliest domesticated dog was found in China at the early Neolithic (7000-5800 BC) Jiahu site in Henan Province.
European Mesolithic sites like Skateholm (5250-3700 BC) in Sweden have dog graves, proving the value of the furry beasts to hunter-gatherer settlements. Danger Cave in Utah provides the earliest case of dog burial in the Americas (about 11,000 years ago).
Pat Shipman postulates another crucial way humans and dogs learnt to cooperate; dogs developed the ability to follow the gaze of their guardians. When we looked towards something (without pointing or nodding towards it), dogs learned to recognise that we are directing their attention towards it.
A study by Hiromi Kobayashi and Shiro Kohshima of the Tokyo Institute of Technology shows that modern humans are unique among primates in that we have highly visible white sclerae surrounding the coloured irises of our eyes, as well as eyelids that expose much of the sclerae. According to the Japanese team, in other primates, the dark sclerae, similarly coloured skin and concealing eyelids mask the direction in which the animal is looking. Not so in human beings.
Obviously, silent communication between humans would be advantageous for hunting in groups.
Humans tend to look into their dogs’ eyes to ‘read’ their emotions. Dogs apparently feel the same. Maybe—just maybe—this reciprocal communication was instrumental in the survival of our species. Today, many scientists theorise that the bond between man and dog probably contributed to the downfall of the Neanderthals—the species that had dominated Europe for 250,000 years.
The question is, how is it that we modern humans, Homo sapiens, survived and populated the planet, whereas the Neanderthal man (Homo neanderthalensis) disappeared? After all, the Neanderthals had been successfully living in what is today Europe and parts of western and central Asia for 250,000 years before ‘modern’ humans showed up, walking out of Africa just 70,000 years ago. The Neanderthals made tools and created art, built homes with animal bones, even had a language and, going by their bone structure, were probably far stronger than Homo sapiens. The archaeological and paleontological evidence even suggests that the two human species lived side by side in Europe and the Middle East for about 10,000 years, between 45,000 and 35,000 years ago.
Abruptly, no more recently than 25,000 years ago, there were no Neanderthals. An entire species just vanished! What happened? A new hypothesis has now emerged, one that is not perhaps as damning to human beings—and makes us look at our canine companions in quite a different light.
According to this theory, the reason why we humans made it through the Palaeolithic era whereas Neanderthals faded away is that we domesticated dogs.
Coren has concrete proof of the fact that while our ancestors teamed up with dogs, the Neanderthals ate them. He writes, “That’s the beauty of behavioural anthropology. We never found dog bones in association with Neanderthals, unless they had tooth marks on them, which suggests Neanderthal man may have hunted and eaten the wolf-like dog ancestors. Among Cro-Magnons, at burial sites, people and these dog ancestors were found together. Not only did Cro-Magnons associate with dogs, they must have cared for them if they were buried with them.”
Palaeolithic dogs probably did help men survive, but they were not what you might call cute. They weighed, on average, 32 kg, and had a shoulder height of at least 60 cm. These were beasts comparable to today’s German Shepherds and built on the lines of Arnold Schwarzenegger rather than a woman supermodel.
At sites where the canine remains have been found in today’s Siberia and the Czech Republic, an abundance of mammoth bones have also been discovered. One conclusion is that Palaeolithic dogs helped carry mammoth meat from kill sites back to camp.
Two researchers from the Finnish Game and Fisheries Institute found that using large Norwegian Elkhounds or Finnish Spitzes increased the average carcass weight that a hunter could bring home by 56 per cent.
A further study of the Mayanga and Miskito peoples of Nicaragua showed that 85 per cent of the mammals caught in hunts involved the use of dogs. In fact, dogs were vital if hunters wanted to encounter game in the first place—hunters were six times more likely to find armadillos using dogs, and nine times more likely to find agoutis (a species of large, and apparently very tasty, rats). Another recent study of the Bofi and Aka forest hunters of the Central African Republic showed that porcupine hunts were 57 per cent faster, and pouched rat hunts 41 per cent faster, when dogs were on the trail.
In sum, if these deductions hold true for the Palaeolithic Age, dogs must have saved humans a lot of energy, rendering each kill a greater net gain in food. More food would mean better-fed mothers with more milk to nurse more babies. Which would mean population growth. Guess what? Our ancestors—and you—owed their lives to the forefathers of that dog you just kicked.
The fact that modern man displaced the Neanderthals by weight of population was recently proven by an analysis of 164 archaeological sites of Homo sapiens and Neanderthals by Paul Mellars and Jennifer C. French. Their article in Science shows that in the period of overlap, we humans displaced our cousins with sheer numbers, outbreeding them by as much as 10 to 1.
And dogs lugging meat were quite probably responsible.
So for the past 12,000 years, human beings and dogs have been looking each other in the eye and seeing an ally. Dogs see us as friends and providers—trustworthy, in short. And for 12,000 years, we have been relying on them as guardians and hunting companions.
You may argue that dogs have killed children in our cities. That Pitbull Terriers, Doberman Pinschers, Rhodesian Ridgebacks were bred to hunt and kill men. But recent studies have come to some surprising conclusions. First, despite the clear evidence for marked size differentiation in very early dogs (e.g., small, medium and large dogs found at Svaerdborg in Denmark), this has nothing to do with current dog breeds. Mitochondrial DNA studies suggest that wolves and dogs split into different species around 100,000 years ago.
Additional evidence comes from Ádám Miklósi and his team from Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary, who tested dogs and wolves. They found that dogs were far more attentive to human faces than wolves—even socialized wolves. Although wolves excel at some gaze-following tasks, perhaps suggesting a pre-adaptation for communicating with humans, dogs tend to look at human faces for cues habitually. Wolves do not.
Miklósi’s team believes this major behavioural difference is the result of selective breeding during domestication.
Second, a study of pieces of DNA called SNPs (single-nucleotide polymorphism), which have been identified as markers for modern dog breeds, published in 2012, shows that the oldest modern dog breeds are no more than 500 years old, and most date only from just 150 years ago.
This means the so-called viciousness we associate with some breeds of dog is actually a very recent—and man-made—creation because today’s ‘pedigree’ dogs have an ancestry going back to less than 150 years. The viciousness of Canis lupus or wolves was removed long ago from Canis lupus familiaris.
Colin Groves of the Australian National University, Canberra, believes that our success as a species is at least partly due to help from dogs: “The human-dog relationship amounts to a very long-lasting symbiosis. Dogs acted as human’s alarm systems, trackers, and hunting aides, garbage disposal facilities, hot water bottles, and children’s guardians and playmates. Humans provided dogs with food and security. The relationship was stable over 100,000 years or so, and intensified in the Holocene into mutual domestication. Humans domesticated dogs and dogs domesticated humans.”
Dogs have always been our only real friends in the animal kingdom. But we treat them with a truly astonishing lack of gratitude.
We have an army of politicians and leaders governing the world who may decide at any time that nuttiness is the best policy and make the world a nuclear wasteland for the foreseeable future. No lights, no electricity, no internet, no mod cons, back to the ways of the Cro-Magnon. Hunting, gathering, guarding against opposing tribes and sects and religions; general mayhem.
And guess what will be mankind’s only saviour? Once again, probably, Canis lupus familiaris.
Save & read from anywhere!
Bookmark stories for easy access on any device or the Swarajya app.
Selections from Swarajya's 40,000 pages of archives since 1956.
Introducing ElectionsHQ + 50 Ground Reports Project
The 2024 elections might seem easy to guess, but there are some important questions that shouldn't be missed.
Do freebies still sway voters? Do people prioritise infrastructure when voting? How will Punjab vote?
The answers to these questions provide great insights into where we, as a country, are headed in the years to come.
Swarajya is starting a project with an aim to do 50 solid ground stories and a smart commentary service on WhatsApp, a one-of-a-kind. We'd love your support during this election season.
Click below to contribute.