PREFACE

Dog 2 Dog

A couple of years ago a young editor at The Overlook Press tracked me through cyberspace to ask if I would consider writing a book about how the wolf became the dog, or in the shorthand of digital communication, “Wolf 2 Dog,” compressible to “W2D.” Having studied the question for more than twenty years, I had no illusion that the actual transformation could be so neatly distilled, but I welcomed the chance to examine what was known and suspected against what was possible in the world at the time of the various periods in question. The task is complicated by a difference in scale between geologic time, measured in tens of thousands to billions of years, and biological time, counted in years and decades. Whatever genetic mutations were involved in W2D appeared and were isolated within several generations, and despite continued tinkering in some places by human breeders, those changes have persisted over geological time.

In the past two years, a number of new scientific papers have rocked, if not overturned completely—yet—the prevailing view that the dog was derived from a self-taming group of garbage-dump grazing, juvenilized wolves during the Mesolithic Age, when our forebears, beginning in the Near East or Southeast Asia or both, renounced their big-game hunting migratory ways for exploitation of a more diverse, local food base, including more aquatic life, game of different sizes, and nuts and grains. In fact, about the only certainty left by the fall of 2010 was the identification of the gray wolf as the wild progenitor of the dog, the two being closer genetically than are the races of humans.

Dog remains dating from around sixteen thousand years ago in the Ukraine, twenty-seven thousand years ago in the Czech Republic, and more than thirty thousand years ago in Belgium were identified. The finds firmly established Europe as the continent with the oldest dogs on record, even though no expert believes that dogs originated there, and more definitively established the dog as a creation of hunting and gathering people on the move.

Increasingly sophisticated genetic analyses have suggested that just a few mutations with large morphological effects—reduced size, dwarfed legs, and brachycephalic, or punched-in, snouts, for example—account for the physiological and, perhaps, the behavioral differences between dog and wolf. For example, a 20-pound animal with bowed, dwarfed legs and a broad, flat nose, like a Pekingese, is going to see and move through the world far differently from a 150-pound mastiff, or a 50-pound Sloughi with its long straight legs capable of speeding close to thirty miles an hour.

Moreover, despite evidence that the little Middle Eastern wolves might serve as foundation stock for the dog, the most sophisticated and thorough genetic survey to date by researchers in the laboratory of Robert K. Wayne, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California at Los Angeles, failed to point to a place where the transformation occurred. Rather, it appears that several types of dog were consolidated from the mixing of Middle Eastern dogwolves with those derived from other wolves.

The question of the dog’s origins becomes even more complicated by the association of wolves with hominins, most notably Homo erectus and Homo neanderthalis, who preceded the arrival of our species among the hunters of the Pleistocene. Did they have socialized wolves and even dogwolves? Without firm evidence of the hominins’ direct association with wolves, I suggest that even if they did, their animals do not figure in the evolution of the dog in human society. Nonetheless, the hominins cannot be ignored, since they were full members of the Guild of Carnivores, the big predators who fed on the migrating herds of reindeer and horse. To keep them in proper perspective relative to their other guild members, I often refer to them as “furless bipeds,” because they lacked their own fur.

I also use the term “socialized” rather than “tamed” wolves to emphasize that the animals were active participants in the process and that their behavior and adjustment to humans went far beyond simple “taming.” In cases where socialized wolves existed in sufficient number to form reproducing groups in human camps, I call their offspring “dogwolves,” or “doglike wolves,” a descriptive I find more accurate than the traditional “wolfdogs,” or “wolflike dogs.” These names represent a world of difference. Dogwolves are wolves that genetically and behaviorally are dogs; we know this because their genetic profile more closely aligns with dog than wolf and because they reproduce and live in human society, looking out on their wild cousins. But these dogs do not appear in the fossil record with the physiological changes that archaeologists consider essential to calling an animal domesticated, including an overall reduction in size and robustness and a shortening and broadening of the muzzle that forced crowding of the teeth before they too became smaller. That size reduction, shortening of the nose and jaws, and other physical changes increasingly appear caused by specific genetic mutations that arose in particular dogwolf lines and became highly desired because of their uniqueness and utility.

Seen in that light, there was no identifiable domestication event; rather, mutations were captured and passed on for reasons of utility or desire or amusement or lassitude in certain populations of dogwolves. It thus becomes more accurate in many ways to speak less of how the wolf became the dog and more of how the dog became the dog—W2D becomes D2D. The change reflects the way natural and artificial selection have worked to create the dog since the earliest encounters of humans and wolves. The small dog itself, long the standard marker for dogs, could owe its distinctive size to its ancestor Middle Eastern wolves, some of which are in the twenty- to thirty-pound range.

My operating premise throughout is that the dog is inherent in the wolf, and the dog lover in all humans—that is, members of the human genus—making the emergence of the flesh-and-blood dog an evolutionary inevitability. Essentially, among the broader population of Pleistocene wolves and humans were individuals who by virtue of extreme sociability or curiosity, or both, became best friends and compatriots after encountering each other on the trail. That connection could have happened on any trail and anywhere that anatomically modern humans met Canis lupus—puppy, juvenile, or adult. The question then becomes why some of these relationships continued to grow and flourish while others perished.

My goal is to identify those mixing zones complete with wolves and humans and to show how they represent an early step in the process of domestication that is in certain fundamental ways only now drawing to a close—in a way that sometimes does disservice to both dogs and people. I have attempted to reconstruct the types of environments and ecosystems that our forebears would have encountered in their migratory-game following, especially the refuges during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) when people and animals would have mixed. The dog, I suggest, arose from the mixing zone of the ancient Near East among a group of anatomically modern humans, with a lot more mixing and matching between then and now.

The dog finally is a biological and sociocultural creation that has in turn affected its human companion—albeit to a less physical and psychological degree. The wolves and people who took up together tens of thousands of years ago could not have foreseen the many divergent paths that they have followed, much less what they have become. They did not even ask. They simply took to traveling with each other and never stopped. The relationship takes many different forms, to be sure. Too often, ignorance, prejudice, and fear substitute for knowledge and compassion, but that situation applies to people as well as to their dogs and other animals.

It is perhaps more important for everyone involved with dogs to consider that wolf and human were drawn to each other by their great sociability and curiosity, and they stayed together because of their mutual utility. Each benefited from the relationship in various ways. Arguably our obligation today, when we and our dogs grow increasingly distant from the world of our forebears—to the extent that it sometimes seems we live on a different planet—is to think about whether on this journey, we are doing right by our companion every step of the way.

I hope that in some way, this book contributes to that conversation. For now, I think it best to let the story unfold, after one final stylistic note. In order to illustrate specific points, I have created scenarios that are clearly designated as such in the text running up to them and by the italics in which they are printed. They are true to their time, insofar as I was able to make them. Otherwise, the material in this book is factual, recognizing that facts in the study of the distant past—where evidence is often less than pieces of bone and fragments of DNA, which is to say nearly nonexistent—are finally provisional. Yet from these fragments it is possible to weave something approaching a coherent narrative, or at least an attempt at one.

—MARK DERR
April 21, 2011