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The great changes that swept through Europe in the Upper Palaeolithic were products of the refreshed human mind, capable not only of great innovation but also of seeing the world in a different way. An essential element in this process was our ability to learn from observation, to reproduce novelties whenever we saw them. This ability is still with us today, aided by language and other forms of communication. Nowadays new ideas spread around the world almost instantaneously. Even though in the distant past the diffusion of ideas would have been much slower than this, invention and creativity were a characteristic of the time. Whether it be the best way to make an arrowhead or a spear-thrower, or the method of threading beads to make a necklace, or how to make a primitive flute by drilling holes in the wing bone of a swan, all these ideas spread through observation and duplication.
The observant Palaeolithic hunter would have seen wolves in action, relentlessly pursuing their prey until the hunted beast was exhausted, then surrounding it. Unable to inflict a fatal bite through the spinal cord like a lion, the wolf must lunge to inflict flesh wounds until, at last, the animal collapses through loss of blood. It is not a pretty sight as, more often than not, the animal is disembowelled while still alive. More to the point, the endgame is dangerous for the wolves, who risk injury from the last desperate thrashings of their dying prey.
Our ancestors would have witnessed this drawn-out death struggle and realised how easily they could have killed the cornered beast. A spear thrown from a safe distance at an animal held at bay by a wolf pack would be an easy kill. The remarkable stamina of the wolf pack could run down the swiftest prey. By comparison human hunters were no match in the pursuit, but with spears, bows and arrows they could kill even the largest animal cornered by wolves with little risk of injury to themselves.
No doubt at first the final act would seem to the wolves like yet another theft of a kill. Wolves have always been vulnerable to having their kills taken over by more dominant predators. Their ability to rapidly consume, or ‘wolf down’, the nourishing internal organs like the heart and liver, and then to quickly carve off huge chunks of meat using their razor-sharp carnassial teeth, was an ancient adaptation to minimise loss.
In such a situation, it is only a small step for a human hunter to realise how to pacify the wolves. Sharing the carcass is all that is needed. Cooperative hunting is of obvious benefit to both sides, if only the wolves themselves could appreciate the benefit of the deal. This approach would not work with lions or bears, but wolves hunted very much as we did, cooperatively in small groups with each member having a separate role.
There is precious little evidence to support my proposition of a working alliance between man and wolf. It makes a great deal of sense to join forces with a wolf pack in the pursuit of sustenance, so it is a reasonable and attractive speculation, but I freely admit that it is the product of my imagination. I felt nervous about proposing it until I discovered that the great zoologist Konrad Lorenz had already envisaged a similar scenario. In his charming book Man Meets Dog, Lorenz writes a fictional account of cooperative hunting between humans and a pack of jackals, which he saw as the wild ancestor of modern dogs.1 He was mistaken about the jackal, as we now know, but he could equally have chosen the wolf. In 2015, the archaeologist Pat Shipman proposed that a hunting alliance between man and wolf was a major factor contributing to the extinction of the Neanderthals.2
I much prefer this explanation, of hunting cooperation leading to trust, for the origin of ‘domestication’ to the alternatives. Foremost among these, and the one most geneticists seem to prefer (even though I suspect many of them have never seen a wolf), is that wolves became accustomed to human company by hanging around their camps and picking up scraps of food from rubbish tips. As well as being dreary in the extreme, this explanation falls down simply because ‘domestication’ was already well under way by the time humans congregated in large enough settlements to produce sufficient waste to sustain an animal with the appetite of a wolf. Nor does it explain why, of all animals including coyotes, jackals, badgers and bears capable of surviving on refuse, none ever developed a bond of the strength and depth that comes close to matching that between human and wolf – in its modern incarnation, the dog.
Almost nothing remains of human activity on the open plains, so evidence of cooperative hunting is always going to be hard to find. Only in the dank recesses of subterranean caverns can we find physical evidence of our distant ancestry. At Chauvet it is not bones nor teeth but paintings and those enigmatic footprints that are the lens through which we glimpse the lives of our ancestors. Eight hundred kilometres north of Chauvet another river, the Samson, cuts through another limestone gorge, its walls pierced by caves. Here at Goyet, though, there is no need to search for the ancient breath of hidden galleries. The caves are wide open and unlike Chauvet have been occupied by humans, both Neanderthal and modern, for a very long time. Excavations at Goyet began in 1867, three years after the Neanderthal type specimen was excavated in the eponymous valley close to Düsseldorf in Germany.
The cave at Goyet contains large numbers of human bones from about 120,000 years BP, including Neanderthals and modern humans along with thousands of artefacts. Our interest is focused on one skull found in a crevice and dated to around 32,000 years BP, in the same age range as the first Chauvet drawings. There is no doubt that it is the skull of a canid, but whether it belonged to a wolf or a dog or something in between is uncertain and, as you might expect, fiercely debated. The snout is certainly shorter than that of a modern wolf, so it shares that characteristic with dogs. Again predictably, and rather like the case of the original Neanderthal skull, which was at first thought to be that of a deformed human, some see it as merely a wolf with a very short nose.
The short snout and wide braincase of a canid skull (a) found in Belgium’s Goyet cave, in comparison with two ancient wolves found in nearby caves (b, c), led scientists to claim that the Goyet skeleton is from a 36,000-year-old dog. This image is reproduced courtesy of the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Science and Wilfred Miseur. (The Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Science, Wilfrid Miseur)
If wolves and humans were discovering the mutual advantages of hunting together, perhaps one might expect wolves to feature prominently in the images at Chauvet, Goyet and elsewhere. Yet they are conspicuously absent from these murals. The only wolf-like image from this area is a crude outline from the Dordogne, at Font-de-Gaume, an area rich in limestone caves with a long history of prehistoric human occupation, both Neanderthal and modern. The drawing is among over 200 images of contemporary animals, including the usual suspects like mammoth, bison and woolly rhinoceros, and dates to around 17,000 years BP. Other than this, there are no depictions of wolves at Font-de-Gaume or in any nearby caves. The other notable subject about from these cave paintings is ourselves. There are no images of humans anywhere to be seen. Why not? It is as if the taboo our ancestors felt about creating a human image also extended to the wolf.
I am reminded of Conan Doyle’s short story ‘The Adventure of Silver Blaze’, concerning the theft of a prize racehorse and the murder of its trainer. In solving the crime, Sherlock Holmes explains to Inspector Gregory of Scotland Yard that the dog guarding the stables must have recognised the culprit.
‘Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?’ asks Gregory.
‘To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time,’ replies Holmes.
‘The dog did nothing in the night-time,’ responds Gregory.
‘That was the curious incident,’ replies Holmes.