Let’s Not Forget Our Greatest Allies
Every city has them. Every city ignores them or treats them as a nuisance to be either ignored or disposed of as the mood takes them. They are treated with incredible cruelty — beaten, killed, strangled, abandoned on the roads, poisoned, trained to be killers, and put into fighting rinks against stronger and more vicious opponents . . . the list is pretty much endless.
Yet they show immense faith in us. They still trust in Homo Sapiens. Even though we are their killers and torturers.
They’re Canis Lupus familiaris. The animals we normally call dogs.
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,” Pat Shipman, an anthropologist at Penn State University, 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. (And looking at our cities today, nothing much has changed). Any uneaten food, any parts of an animal Cro Magnon man didn’t want to consume was chucked outside their settlements.
Stanley Coren, a psychology professor at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, in his latest book, “The Modern Dog: A Joyful Exploration of How We Live With Dogs Today” says, “We know early man was a bit of slob. Body parts that 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, people were warned who lived in these settlements.”
So, as is the case today, dogs congregated around these piles of delicious garbage (Waste? They call this waste?) then, being pack animals, they marked out their territory and defended it against other animals. They saw Humans as a source of food and were appropriately grateful.
Humans noticed that dogs could run faster, smell better and track better than they could. Since their most effective weapon was a bow and arrow — which usually only wounded prey — they needed an ally who could bring their dinner back to them.
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 for predators (human or otherwise).
Of course, there was companionship and unconditional love dogs give us.
What’s interesting is that dogs do more than make you feel good; they’re actually good for you.
Petting a familiar and friendly dog will slow down your heart rate, your breathing becomes more regular and your muscles will 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 Czech Republic is that humans began domesticating dogs as long ago as 35,000 years ago. Recent genome research shows strong evidence that European Paleolithic 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 “nobody-argues-about-it” 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 burials, proving the value of the furry beasts to hunter-gatherer settlements. Danger Cave in Utah is currently the earliest case of dog burial in the Americas. That took place about 11,000 years ago.
Anthropologist Pat Shipman writing in Scientific American, postulates one more crucial way in which humans and dogs learnt to cooperate; dogs developed the ability to follow the gaze of their guardians. Meaning that when we look toward something (without pointing or nodding toward it), dogs have learned to recognize that we’re directing their attention toward 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 colored 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 colored skin and concealing eyelids mask the direction in which the animal is looking.
On the other hand, in humans, the white sclerae and open eyelids make the direction of a person’s gaze visible from a distance, particularly if that glance is directed more or less horizontally. The Japanese study suggests that the changes in the human eye may be adaptations to enhance the effectiveness of the gaze signal.
Michael Tomasello and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, developed this idea as the “cooperative eye hypothesis.” White sclerae appear only occasionally among chimpanzees, but the trait is not widespread. Tomasello and his colleagues suggested that the advantage of the white sclerae must be related to something that ancient humans did commonly and chimpanzees didn’t do or did rarely. According to their analysis, although chimpanzees hunt small prey, often cooperatively, meat makes up less than 2 percent of their diet, whereas Paleolithic humans hunted much larger game and meat apparently provided a far more significant part of their diet. They suggest that cooperation between human beings was made easier by Homo Sapiens’ ability to recognize where another member of the species was looking.
Obviously, silent communication between humans would be advantageous for hunting in groups.
But there is another skilled gaze-reader.
Canis Lupus familiaris.
More familiarly known as Bella, Max, Luna, Charlie, Lucy, Cooper, Daisy, Milo, Fido, or Chester, or Ginger, or in my case, Twiggy; the domestic dog.
According to research results published by Ernõ Téglás, of the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary, and his colleagues, a dog will follow the gaze of a videotaped human — if the human first attracts the dog’s attention by speaking to it and looking at it. Indeed, dogs perform as well as human infants when it comes to following the gaze of a speaker, especially in tests in which the speaker’s head is held still.
Humans love 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 are theorizing that the bond between man and dog probably contributed to the downfall of the Neanderthals — the species that had dominated Europe for the previous 250,000 years.
The question is, how is it that we modern humans, Homo Sapiens, survived and populated the planet, whereas 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 well over 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.
Then, boom!
Abruptly, no more recently than 25,000 years ago, there were no Neanderthals. An entire species just vanished.
What happened?
There are several theories, including volcanic eruptions, a plague that only affected the Neanderthals and of course, the cynical view that Cro-Magnon men were the first to indulge in humanity’s favorite past-time; genocide. But a new hypothesis has now appeared, 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, there is one overwhelming reason why we humans made it through the Paleolithic era whereas Neanderthals faded away.
We domesticated dogs.
Dogs? Furry, cute, little dogs helped man survive as a species?
Stanley 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 behavioral 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, but they must have cared for them if they were buried with them.”
Of course, Paleolithic dogs probably did help men survive, but they were not what you might call cute. They weighed, on average, 32 kilograms and had a shoulder height of at least 60 centimeters. These were huge beasts comparable to today’s German Shepherds and built on the lines of Arnold Schwarzenegger rather than a supermodel.
At the sites where the canine remains have been found in today’s Siberia and the Czech Republic, an abundance of mammoth bones have also been found. One conclusion is that Paleolithic dogs helped carry mammoth meat from kill sites back to camp.
Doing research on the subject, two researchers from the Finnish Game and Fisheries Institute put together the closest thing we have today to a mammoth hunt when they compared the results of hunting moose with and without dogs.
Not surprisingly, they found that using large Norwegian Elkhounds or Finnish Spitzes increased the average carcass weight that a hunter could bring back home by 56 percent.
A further study of the Mayanga and Miskito peoples of Nicaragua showed that 85 percent 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 percent faster, and pouched rat hunts 41 percent faster, when dogs were on the trail.
In sum, if these deductions hold true for the Paleolithic 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 service 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 the Science Journal, shows that in the period of overlap, we humans displaced our cousins with sheer numbers, outbreeding them as much as 10 to 1.
And dogs lugging meat were quite probably responsible.
And how did we get dogs — those creatures who in that inimitable Indian phrase, ‘make nuisance,’ in our streets — to cooperate with us?
Probably the white sclerae.
It is likely that it became universal among humans because it enabled them to communicate better — not only with each other but also with dogs. Once dogs could read a human gaze signal, they would have been even more useful as hunting partners.
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), 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 of Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary, and his team 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 preadaptation for communicating with humans, dogs tend to look at human faces for cues habitually.
Wolves do not.
Miklósi’s team believed this major behavioral difference was the result of selective breeding during domestication.
Secondly, a recent 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 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 ancestry going back 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. James Hain Friswell had Satan say, “‘I am sure,’ continued he, ‘that, in spite of the service I am doing you, you do not yet like me. You are always thus, you men — ungrateful to your friends. Not that I blame ingratitude; it is a vice upon which I pride myself, since I invented it myself; and I must say, that it is one most in vogue.’”
However, let’s forget about unrealistic expectations — gratitude? Hah-hah.
Just remember we have a bunch of utterly insane Mullahs sitting on our border with their fingers on the consciences of a bunch of military men, who in turn, have their fingers on the nuclear trigger.
In India, we have just voted for a megalomaniac who believes his way is the only right way. Like any typical dictator he has even subverted the judicial system — blame the press, isn’t that typical?
Russia has an elected dictator who still dreams of the days when the entire world worried that Armageddon is coming if the wrong word was said (Dr. Strangelove anybody?) a time when the USSR and the USA were at parity — he stubbornly refuses to accept Russia’s somewhat diminished importance in the world.
In China we have a bunch of enigmatic, hopelessly corrupt, ideologically strangled power-mad maniacs who also control a colossal army and (lest we forget) nuclear weapons.
In the Middle East there’s the utter insanity of ISIS, who — if they somehow get their fingers on nuclear weapons — are quite capable of making sure the planet is pretty much uninhabitable for the next twenty or thirty thousand years, while they luxuriate in heaven with their 72 virgins.
And the worthy citizens of the United States have just voted in a bunch of wealthy, xenophobic, petty-minded nincompoops who are quite capable of starting a war — or two — remember George Bush 2 anyone?
So, 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 Cro Magnon man. Hunting, gathering, guarding against opposing tribes and sects and religions; general mayhem.
And guess what will be mankind’s only savior? Once again?
Probably Canis Lupus familiaris.
References:
http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/pub/do-the-eyes-have-it/4
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog
http://www.animalpeoplenews.org/anp/2012/02/29/the-evolution-and-natural-history-of-dogs/