I was scanning the newspaper for some good news one day (as in, “Author Cameron Wins Everybody’s Favorite Person Award”) when I came across a simple statement that had such profound implications I could barely comprehend them all. Around 30,000 years ago something extraordinary happened: a wolf became a human’s companion. In other words, it was the birth of the first dog.
The article seemed to imply that it was all pretty easy and routine—one day, a wolf, the next day, a dog. But I believed it was such an astounding development in the history of both species, I just had to find out more.
This all happened a little before I was born, so I spent hours and hours doing research on this time period, talking to paleontologists, reading books and articles, even checking out Wikipedia. The era is called the Upper Paleolithic, and it’s striking just how brutal life was for those early humans. As primates, we’d been happiest in the northern forests, but now glaciers were advancing like an invading army, shoving us out onto the plains, where we could be easily hunted as meat by animals of tooth and claw and speed. We had no agricultural sciences, no ranching, but lived opportunistically, chasing food and hoping to catch it before some other predator, or starvation, brought us down. We were competing for many of the same resources not just with lions and other killers, but with Neanderthals, who were stronger and faster and maybe even smarter.
But while I could picture all that, I simply could not come up with a scenario that explained how a wolf became a pet.
I spent a lot of my research time looking into the canine-side of the equation as well. Wolves back then were far more likely to see us as a food source than they do in the current era—the ones who hunted us have historically been killed off. Over time, our actions influenced the evolution of Canis lupus away from aggression and toward elusiveness, so that today, attacks on humans by wolves are rare (and met with lethal retaliation). But 30,000 years ago, we were dinner to these animals. Would we really invite a pack of wolves to come join us by the fire and sing campfire songs? That would be like inviting cannibals to lunch and asking them who they would like to eat.
And our own food supply was scarce enough to suggest we would hardly have wasted it feeding another species. Wolves were, after all, competing for the same prey, hunting the same herds. When I was a child, I didn’t even want to share food with my sister. If people were starving, would we really have tossed meat scraps to our competitors?
So how did we natural enemies become such good friends that I allow one of their descendants to sleep in my bed, nearly shoving me off the mattress each night?
Evolution is a long process. I promise you no wolf pack gave birth to a Labrador who ran over to the Cro-Magnon camp to retrieve tennis balls. Yet what human tribe would have the patience to lure a wolf pack closer and closer to an intimate relationship? No, for this to occur the evolutionary path took an extraordinary shortcut. One person must have had the time and the will to domesticate one wolf.
The Dog Master is a work of fiction based on an indisputable fact: dogs are our companions, their fates inextricably bound to ours. To write it I had to envision a unique human, an extraordinary circumstance, and a wolf whose ancestors had an unusual affinity for Homo sapiens.
That was just the first challenge. The domestication of wolves took place in the most dramatic and dangerous time in human history—the dawn of the last Ice Age. Yet humans almost certainly had no comprehension of the scope of devastation coming their way—they knew local weather, not global climate. The speed of the ice’s advance was, well, glacial. They were involved in the sweep of history, a resurfacing of continents, an extinguishing of many species, a cascade of life-threatening challenges, and yet all they would have been aware of was their own situation. The days might be colder, the hunting more scarce, the fruits slower to ripen, but to them it would portend only further and immediate hardship in a world already designed to be cruel. As an author, the best I could do to set the story’s stage was allow the characters to react to their individual situations and let the reader draw more grand conclusions.
And here’s what we can say for certain about any specific individual human being in this extraordinary time in our history: nothing.
There’s no written record. Cave paintings provide some insight, and the sciences of archaeology and geography contribute much, but in the end we don’t know. Were the people of the time warlike, or peaceful? What was family life like? How did the tribes function? Who were these people? Were any of them kleptomaniacs? Did they have stand-up comedy?
With no manuscripts to study, I could only speculate on what a conversation might be like between two members of the Kindred. I wanted to give the reader a flavor of how their language might have worked, but I was writing in modern English, so all I could do was suggest, through formal sentence construction and an incorporation of vaguely foreign-looking names, that these humans of the Upper Paleolithic were capable of complex statements and had a sophisticated vocabulary, but that it was different from the way we speak today. My choices hopefully convey my artistic choices, but I was aiming for mood and nuance, and in no way presuming to reconstruct how humans would have communicated. For all I know they would say “LOL” to each other.
I am not alone in having to guess: as I read what experts had to say about this particular era, I was struck by how current theories attract consensus and controversy, and how some dogma, accepted in the past, has fallen into disfavor. If you asked me to examine a skull from thousands of years ago and come to a scientific conclusion, the best I could do would be to say, “I think this dude is dead.” But through a lot of hard work by dedicated men and women, we have very complex explanations for a lot of the fossil puzzles from long ago. Explanations which are, of course, impossible to prove.
If you are one of these scientists, I hope you’ll understand that I took artistic license in pursuit of the story I was writing. We cannot for sure identify the diet of every tribe that was wandering Eurasia at that time—in my telling, the Northern Tribes have not yet managed to successfully hunt horses, as an example, though other humans were certainly living on horse flesh. I took a lot of today’s generally accepted theories about early humans in general and adapted them to a story about a very small number of people in particular. I will cheerfully admit I am far more likely to have committed errors in this regard than might have been the case if I had first pursued a doctorate in paleontology. Of course, I’m not bright enough to get a PhD, so the story of The Dog Master would have been put on indefinite hold while I kept flunking my dissertation.
But, as anyone who has ever read A Dog’s Purpose knows, I am rather fond of our four-legged friends, and I’m pretty enamored with the idea that if it hadn’t been for them, we might have entered the Ice Age and not come out the other side.
(I know that technically we are still in an Ice Age, but I went to Hawaii on my honeymoon and can state rather confidently that some areas of the planet have fully recovered.)
Finally, my attention is very much grabbed by the question posed by Professor Morby in the epilogue. The stage has been set, the players are in position, and the most dramatic and challenging time in the entire history of our species is about to commence.
What did happen next?