ELEVEN

Breaking Out;
Breaking Free

Did the dog emerge in Europe, the Near East,
central Asia, southwest Asia, southeast Asia, or
northeast Asia in several different refuges?
In all? In one? Outcrossed and sometimes
crossed out, distinctive types take shape.

As a biological and cultural construct of itself and humans, the dog has always adapted, with varying degrees of human assistance, to the society in which it finds itself. I say that because the niche the dog fills, when left to its own devices and not confined by walls or fences, is the same as that colonized by the socialized wolf—the interstitial space between the human zone of influence around the camp, village, or field and the rest of the world. That is still the dog’s realm, occupied by dogs affiliated with people on enterprises that include protecting the flocks and herds from marauders and reporting on the appearance of strangers. They also have moved into cities, so that their niche runs from the heart of the city to fringes of agricultural fields and beyond. If persecution of wolves would stop, they would soon be coming fast from the other way, like coyotes, only since they are more sociable and more easily tamed than coyotes, they would probably soon be making friends with people and even some dogs. According to a number of anecdotal accounts, they already are. The dog’s innate ability to adapt to new social and ecological conditions may be the same as it ever was, but in many parts of the world, concerted attempts are under way to curb its freedom to do so and to make it a full dependent rather than an ally, assistant, companion. In many ways the history of the dog’s evolution is also the history of its domestication—still a work in progress that is tied to our own evolution and development.

In generalizing about dogs and humans and all the good they have done each other, it is easy to brush past or ignore the abuse of dogs by people, including that meted out by those seeking total control. From ancient times people have attempted to change permanently some dogs’ behavior by physically altering them. People have castrated their dogs, broken off or knocked out their teeth to keep them from chewing through leashes or harnesses, and poured hot seal fat down their throats to destroy their vocal cords, so they would not betray the presence of a hunter over a seal hole. Dogs are frequently neglected or physically abused in the name of discipline. Especially in developed countries where purebred dogs are popular, the trend over the last two hundred years has turned away from the mutualism on which the human-dog relationship was built toward total human dominance and control of the animal’s freedom of movement, reproduction, and ultimately its death. Were we to learn to control ourselves first, we might not have the need to hold dominion over others.

Fortunately for humans and dogs there are strong countercurrents that involve people exercising their dogs’ minds and bodies either in work or sport, as well as taking time to educate and not simply train or condition them. Dog archaeologist Darcy Morey believes this special relationship is manifest in dog burials, the earliest of which dates from fourteen thousand years ago in Bonn-Oberkassel, Germany. This dog was buried with two people. More commonly they are interred with one person or with other dogs, the most spectacular example being the dog cemetery at Ashkelon, Israel, where seven hundred to one thousand dogs were buried in what could have been an exercise in mass mourning for all dogs in the village, except they do not appear to have all died at once.¹

When all the utility is removed, the fundamental delight in the existence of the other must underlie the relationship of human and dog. Often that delight finds expression through simple games.

If I sit and close my eyes, I can almost hear cicadas singing in the late afternoon heat and see through a haze of dust a man sitting on a log. His name is Judt, I think, pronounced in a rush and with a guttural so it sounds like “Jud” punctuated with an “ut” at the end. He seems to have caught a fair number of rats he is throwing one by one to a smallish short-faced wolf who catches and dispatches them on the fly or, failing that, spears them with his front feet after an exaggerated pounce. He brings the dispatched rats to Judt, who tosses them toward a pack of dogwolves nearby who know not to interfere. As the game goes on, more people gather, bringing, I soon realize, not gifts but rats and more rats, as if the village were put up on a rat city. The people are amused at the spectacle but also in awe of the wolf and of Judt—all but the children, who push ever closer to the game until one young boy with perfect timing snatches a rat out of the air, nearly out of the wolf’s mouth, and runs through the waiting pack, the other children in hot pursuit. …

The scene fades and shifts over untold thousands of years through worlds I don’t recognize, although they are of this one, until finally I see a blur—

She is the Kate, springing upward, stretching as she ascends, twisting for more altitude until at the moment of full extension, she realizes she has gone too high. She jackknives, plucks the ball from the air, and then partly rights herself for a vertical reentry. Bobbing to the surface, she swims toward the pool steps with all the calm and grace of a retriever, three small children attached to her tail. She’s been at this game since she arrived at the party, by special invitation, an hour ago.

Tennis ball is her passion. She invented this particular game of toss and catch after realizing that one wall of the pool was higher than the other, and therefore, if she could persuade M to pitch the ball right down the middle line, she could make a daring leap and catch it before hitting water. At this pool there is no high wall and the diving board is an unpredictable launching pad. She improvises. After the first hour, with food being served and her audience dwindling, the Kate climbs out of the pool, looks around to make sure the right people are watching, and trots up to a young man sporting a geometric Maori tattoo from the late Anglo-American Era on the left side of his face, and a new, heavily waxed purple mohawk. He has talked to no one, simply sat watching the Kate without affect. She places the ball on his plastic chair in such a way that it touches his leg and is guaranteed to succumb to gravity at the slightest perturbation in its space. It falls, and the Kate snaps it up after one bounce, then positions it in precisely the same way. She turns and sprints for her spot by the pool. The boy understands the game. He stands and throws it, turns back for his chair. The Kate brings him the ball. He hesitates. She barks at him once, twice. …

The boy’s mother comments that he’s never done anything like that before. “Like never played with a dog before?” M asks. She shrugs.

Leaving, the boy tells his mother, “I want a dog like that kelpie, that wolf.” The Kate looks for all the world like a small wolf or dingo.

His mother looks at him as if he were an alien being. The Kate has turned her attentions to an older man, another guest’s dyspeptic father. It is a wonderful party—for her.

That was the deal, and it did not take long to reach. The socialized wolf who remained close to humans got attention, which it craved, sexual freedom, a steady food supply, and considerable reduction in time spent raising the young and hunting. Even if the gruel was thin, it was better in lean times than what the wild wolf might get. The human got a guard against things that went “Boo!” in the night; hunting partner; camp cleaner; companion; bed warmer; guide in this world and the next; and emergency entrée, for those people who would not rather go hungry than eat dog. That, too, is the same as it ever was.

The appearance of the dog has changed and changed again, but for the most part, the majority of the world’s one-billion dogs continue to do what dogs have always done, which is roam where they please and breed freely. They live on leftovers and scraps put out for them or dump grub supplemented with rodents, reptiles, birds, livestock carcasses, and occasionally a purloined lamb or kid. The wolves of the Abruzzo region of Italy and the Negev Desert in Israel have the same diet as the local free-ranging dogs, except they are wild and the dog is domestic, and that designation largely defines how they are treated.

The cleaving of dog and wolf occurred psychologically, perceptually, culturally, even genetically before the Last Glacial Maximum had begun to melt away. But it was when livestock began to replace wild stock on the grasslands and in the pot that dog and wolf found themselves facing each other across a lethal divide. Then there was no longer any way for human, dog, or wolf to turn away and change the course of their evolution.

But even while we appear finally to have captured the dogwolf on its way to assuming the mantle of dog, like its counterpart in Chauvet Cave, it wavers in and out of focus, a dog one moment, a socialized wolf another. Boy and dogwolf were in that cave near the height of the Last Glacial Maximum around 26,500 years ago, a period of intense cold when the glaciers altered virtually all the earth’s ecosystems. Tundras and deserts spread as rain diminished; entire plant communities changed, forcing all manner of vertebrates and invertebrates to adjust, move, or die. And die they did. And move they did.²

When the deep cold blew in between thirty-three thousand and twenty-eight years ago, people began congregating in warm refuges with their dogwolves, if they had them, the way desert people gathered at an oasis or along a mountain stream, and the North American Plains Indians pitched their winter camps along the Yellowstone River, forming a multicultural community with all the animals who sought shelter in or near the riverine forest. By all indications the most important of these areas was the ancient Near East, expanded for this purpose into the Caucasus-Levant-Gulf-Oasis superhub, a mixing zone that incorporated the once and future crossroads of continents and of history, the cradle of civilization, the area where agriculture and animal husbandry began, the birthplace of at least four of the world’s great religions, the repository of much of the petroleum that holds the world in thrall, and home to the dogwolves at the root of today’s dogs. The Caucasus formed a natural barrier between the cold and arid Mammoth Steppe to the north and, to the south, a warmer, wetter climate people and animals sought. The ranges of the Chinese, Eurasian, and Middle Eastern wolves who figure most prominently in the contemporary dog overlapped there. Southwestern France was also of importance, less for dogs than for its people who were exploiting—in addition to their usual horse or ibex or aurochs or red deer—fish, birds, and smaller prey, much of it seasonally, as they stopped migrating after the herds and became largely sedentary—without agriculture. Their dogwolves were present, but it is not clear that any of their lineages have endured. Other areas of refuge were Italy south of the Alps as well as, it appears, central Asia and after an attack of cold, southeastern China.

The admixing of wolves that has shaped dogs is often attributed to backcrosses to wolves after an initial domestication event, but for that to have happened, people on the move with their domesticated Middle Eastern wolves would have had to pass through areas with sizable populations of European and Chinese wolves. It possibly could have happened where central Asia met the Mammoth Steppe, but it is more plausible, I think, to look for the admixture at one or more genetic crossroads. A major refuge during the Last Glacial Maximum had people and socialized wolves from many regions at least passing through, and their dogwolves were mating because they were more available and closer to each other—ecologically, temperamentally, and behaviorally—than to wild wolves even of their own type.

We do not know all the variations and subpopulations of the three gray wolf subspecies involved, but most available evidence indicates that Pleistocene wolves were highly variable and widespread. Short-face wolves were fairly abundant, and their presence in the canid stew could resolve a lot of the mystery surrounding the final slide from dogwolf to dog, with its congenitally shortened nose—relative to the longer-faced moderns.³

Socialized wolves and even dogwolves were animals in flux, straddling the human world and the natural world until circumstances, which I suspect were related to the abrupt movement of their people, reduced the breeding opportunities of at least several populations. This period of mating not with wild wolves but other dogwolves, and consolidation of a self-reproducing population that nonetheless could accept back-crosses to the parent stock, is what passes in hindsight, aided by the lens of modern genetics, for a domestication event. After they began to inbreed a few peculiar animals began to appear, and some of those oddities became valuable to the people as amusements, spirit animals, hunters, and companions. An extended socialization period and delayed onset of fright response became fixed in the new dog during this period. The dogwolves lost a scant 4 percent of the genetic diversity of their wolf cousins during the hard times, but they emerged as dog. On the move with their people, they began to spread, mating with local wolves and wolfdogs, passing dog genes on to them while increasing their own diversity. Inbreeding and admixture, or mongrelization, are responsible for the dog, most of it occurring within a human context but largely free of human intervention.

Around twenty thousand years ago, temperatures took a dive and radically altered the southern refuges, leaving people and dogs no more places to hide. Sea levels stood an estimated 394 feet lower than today. That translates into a huge number of archaeological sites, given the fondness of the furless biped for water and the fruit of the sea, including evidence, no doubt, that humans and probably earlier hominins knew how to trap fish.

Then, as if they could face no more, temperatures began to rise. Many animals, including humans, downsized and became less robust as the weather warmed, and many that could not downsize or adjust to the new temperatures and vegetative changes perished, perhaps with an assist from the smaller big-brained biped.

Springing out of their refuges, if they had not fled already, were humans, armed with their spear throwers and new stone points, their boomerangs and adornments, in the company of their dogs. Those dogs reflected the deepest and oldest divide in dogdom—that between big dogs and small dogs. The initial and traditional divide between big dogs and little dogs in America is around twenty pounds, with a fudge factor up to thirty pounds, a large feist dog. The fudge factor allows for the occasional big little dog and coming the other way the thirty-one to forty or forty-five-pound little big dog. They bore other distinctive features considered unique to dogs, like a curled tail—a sure way for humans to separate dog from wolf at a glance. I have seen a thirty-pound black Labrador retriever competing in a hunting trial beside her long and lean ninety-pound black Labrador half sibling. Neither was registered with the American Kennel Club, nor could they have met the Labrador standard, but both were outstanding retrievers.⁴

It appears that pulses of consolidation and expansion mark the early history of dog as surely as patterns of inbreeding and outcrossing attend the emergence of modern breeds, many of which show signs of multiple morphologies, especially in terms of size, leg length and shape, and degree of brachycephally. For example, the basenji, looking so much like the common ancestor of the Bedouin/Canaan-type pariah and of the classic sight hound, found its way up the Nile to its source and then into deep jungle where it appears to have been preserved in its ancient form. Wayne’s and Ostrander’s research teams have grouped the dingo with the Chinese Chow Chow and the Japanese Akita, both said to be ancient breeds. I suspect that more study will show that grouping to result from admixture between the dingo and the common ancestor of those two breeds, which are at least several thousand years old. Other genetic assays have suggested that the Bali dog, which has been on the island for twelve thousand years, is also related to the Chow Chow and the Akita, and it is easy to imagine dingoes mating with them either on their way to Australia or once there. Aboriginal artists are believed to have recorded the arrival of the dingo in rock paintings, but that does not preclude the presence of other dogs on the island continent. It is also possible that the common ancestor of dingoes, Chow Chows, Akitas, and Bali dogs was one of the early dogs coming out of the original mixing zone in the Middle East.⁵

Moving back to the sociocultural world, I think the importance of the expanded Middle East in the evolution of dogs is manifest in the strength of the habit of dogs among the people. It has withstood, albeit not easily, the dog prohibitions of Islam, which, as a matter of faith, believes that dogs are filthy and that Allah will not bless a house that has been befouled by the presence of such a beast. Islam does make allowances for working dogs—the pampered sight hounds devoted to the chase and other refined activities; police and military dogs; and flock-guarding dogs, of which there seems to be a variety in every tribal region from India to Turkey and beyond. Indeed, the tradition of the dog is so strong that the traditional sight hound of the desert, the Sloughi, or Saluki (depending on the sources), was traditionally given complete freedom in the Bedouin’s tent. The Bedouin took every precaution to prevent unwanted mating between their hounds and their guard dogs—hobbling their female hounds so if another dog tried to mount her, she was forced to sit down. Unfortunately, in Saudi Arabia today the native dogs are not well kept, as the old traditions—good and bad—die out.⁶

Geneticists love the often inbred, multigenerational pedigrees of purebred dogs for studying complex patterns of inheritance of disease and behavior and increasingly parsing out intricate histories under domestication. But they sometimes forget to remember that they are dealing with a small percentage of the world’s dogs, whose evolutionary trajectory since the time their breeds were established has been largely controlled by humans, whereas the majority of dogs still have at least one paw in the natural world, subject to its constraints and demands. In recent decades, purebred-dog associations have moved to boost their registrations, and income, by recognizing more and more of the estimated four hundred dog breeds extant in the world today.

These include landraces or, more frequently, autochthonous breeds refined from regional types of dogs—various feists and curs from the American South, the Kintamani dog from the Bali dog, the earlier, successful consolidation of the Canaan Dog from the Bedouin dog, the Carolina dog from free-ranging dogs in South Carolina, as well as Sioux and Navajo Indian dogs from undifferentiated, randomly breeding reservation dogs. Breeders of the New Guinea Singing Dog have a longstanding campaign to have it recognized as a separate species of Canis or, failing that, a subspecies of the gray wolf. It is closely related to Australia’s dingo, but unlike the dingo, it appears always to have had a social and working relationship with the native highland people of Papua New Guinea.

Useful as studies involving modern dogs have been, a growing number of geneticists interested in the evolution of the dog and history of breeds recognize that it is necessary to compare DNA from ancient dogs and ancient wolves—as much as possible. Such DNA is difficult to obtain, because it breaks down under natural conditions and is prone to corruption. But evidence abounds that maternal lineages, as expressed through mitochondrial DNA, have changed over at least once since the dog raced out of the Last Glacial Maximum. That is why I think it’s fair to talk about basic types that resulted from fundamental mutations or combinations of characteristics. These changes in appearance, with behavioral adaptations, collectively define the domestication event that led to the dog.