The Intimate Bond (5 page)

Big Bad Wolves?

Wolves receive consistently bad press, which goes back a long way, probably because they killed cattle and sheep. They are ravening, fierce killers. They decimate sheep in their pens, attack children, and haunt dark forests on the margins of small villages. The fictional Big Bad Wolf is an enduring stereotype, with deep roots in medieval folklore. In Norse mythology, Skoll the wolf swallows the sun when the world perishes in
Ragnarök, a cataclysm of violent battle and natural disasters. Big Bad Wolf has become a menacing antagonist, a generic cautionary tale, even featured in Disney movies and on
Sesame Street
(where he repented of his sins and took up a hobby: blowing bubbles).
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In fact, we now know that many individual wolves are timid and even friendly, as well as being intensely curious.

Bad press went hand in hand with wholesale slaughter. Fifteen thousand years ago we lived alongside wolves in what must have been a state of cautious but easy familiarity. In some places, they must have been as commonplace a sight as people walking dogs on city streets today. Once we became farmers, however, we turned on our predator neighbors, to protect our stock when the wolf's traditional wild prey became scarce. As herds and flocks proliferated and people settled in more crowded landscapes, they eradicated wolves whenever they could. Rulers and governments joined the fray. As long ago as the sixth century
BCE
the Athenian lawmaker Solon offered a bounty for every wolf that was killed. Wolves eventually influenced religious doctrine. Christian symbolism depicted the wolf as the devil, the evil being that pursued and suborned the living faithful. To protect flocks and herds, European kings paid bounties for wolves. Wolf packs were extinct in England by the end of King Henry VII's reign in 1509, hunted and trapped relentlessly as sheep killers. The vendetta crossed the Atlantic. By 1930, there were virtually no wolves left in the United States' Lower Forty-Eight and none in the West. Yet gray wolves remain the most widespread large mammals on earth after people and their livestock, although they now occupy but a third of their ancient range. Fortunately, generations of research have taught us a great deal about them and their impact on the landscape.

More on a Social Predator

Gray wolves somewhat resemble German shepherds, but with larger heads, longer legs, and bigger paws. They are slender, powerfully built animals that move swiftly, their long legs allowing them to navigate through the deep snow that falls over much of their range. Wolves have
no enemies except humans and, in the Russian Far East, Siberian tigers. After humans and lions, they were once the world's most widely distributed mammals, accustomed to living alongside people, with whom they shared common prey.

Like humans, wolves are social animals, which live in close-knit packs. Most groups consist of two parents and their offspring, with occasionally a sibling or some other individuals.
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There's a strong dominance hierarchy in wolf packs, the two top-ranking beasts being the breeding pair. Subordinate, mature animals are subservient to them, but these usually disperse from their natal group and form their own breeding packs. The hierarchy changes constantly, dominance and submission being measured by body postures such as the position of the ears or tail. The packs are constantly on the move, usually traveling in single file. They can cover long distances when following in the tracks of game such as migrating caribou. When hunting, they rely on their acute sense of smell, which is said to allow them to locate a moose and its young over 7 kilometers (4.5 miles) away. They approach their prey silently, cautiously, and rapidly, chasing it at full speed, hoping to run it down within a short distance. Experts say that only about 10 percent of wolf hunts are successful, largely because animals such as moose and musk ox can defend themselves effectively while standing at bay. By contrast, caribou, deer, and reindeer rely on their speed to escape. The actual attacks involve the pack surrounding their prey and biting at it to bring it down. The wolves immediately start eating the dead beast, consuming as much as they can to compensate for long periods without food. Wolves are often scavengers, for they prey on older animals and young beasts and fawns, especially at times when their prey is weak and poorly nourished after a long winter.

Wolves are some of the most social of all predators. Such behavior may have originated with their adaptation to cooperative hunting of large ungulates such as bison or reindeer during the Ice Age, especially during the actual kill. In so doing, they behaved just like very early humans, who combined opportunism with scavenging. At first wolves were more successful than people, whose weapons were little more than fire-hardened or stone-tipped spears, at being able to get as close to the
prey as possible. Judging from injuries found on Neanderthal skeletons, the hunters of fifty thousand years ago sometimes physically jumped onto the backs of larger animals to drive a spear into their hearts. There are analogies with wolves here, who rely on fast pursuit, then attack at close quarters.

With the appearance of
Homo sapiens
, modern people, in tropical Africa some one hundred fifty thousand years ago, the competitive gap between wolves and humans narrowed because of the gradually improving technology used by human hunters—the antler-tipped spear propelled by a spear thrower, which increased range and accuracy, then the bow and poisoned arrows. By thirty thousand years ago, humans and wolves were close neighbors in European and Eurasian landscapes. Both lived in tightly structured groups; both wolves and people raised their young as part of a small community. On many occasions, hunters and wolves may even have hunted together, in situations where both sides were familiar with, and not afraid of, one another.

If their cave paintings are any guide, hunters of thirty thousand years ago respected their prey and fellow predators. Wolves never appear in their rock art, but they were so commonplace that people must have respected their close neighbors and incorporated them both into their hunting lore and into mythic tales as important actors in the drama of cosmic origins. This is, of course, merely an assumption, but it has solid foundations in the ways in which modern northern hunters treat wolves. The Nunamiut Eskimos of Alaska admire wolves' hunting expertise when attacking caribou. Inuit hunters in the Arctic thought of them as guides, even as animals that were once people—and hence as brothers. But there were also tales of dangerous wolves, evil forces at creation. For the most part, the relationship between people and wolf was one of respect on the human side and, on occasion, of curiosity on the other. There were also advantages for both sides.

In the predator-rich landscapes of the Late Ice Age, wolves would have been commonplace, familiar beasts. Their human neighbors would have known, for example, that wolf packs move constantly in search of quarry except during the denning season of spring and early summer.
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They would have been aware of the strategic locations where
packs would track and hunt down migrating reindeer—often the very same places where humans ambushed the massed beasts. Both were intensely social animals accustomed to opportunism and scavenging, even from one another's kills. It would have been an easy step for wolves to scavenge discarded bones and meat from human kills carried back to hunting camps. Over the centuries, such scavenging would have become second nature, bringing human and beast into ever-closer juxtaposition. The wolves took advantage of human tolerance in supplying them with food. Both humans and wolves were accustomed to cooperation, cooperation in the hunt, in observing their surroundings, and in social relationships. Years of scavenging could have led to an easy familiarity, even to situations where some more sociable wolves lay close to feeding hunters, signaling, perhaps with their eyes or other gestures, that they wanted the leftovers. In time, too, one can imagine hunters and these same wolves tracking reindeer herds, the wolves acting as guides, perhaps surrounding the quarry, and the hunters, with their efficient weaponry, acting as the killers. A few wolves, or entire packs, may have associated themselves with hunting bands, perhaps warning against other predators, scouting game, scavenging meat. There would have been advantages on either side: more reliable food supplies for the wolves, a measure of protection and intelligence for the hunters.

Dog-wolves?

When did wolves become dogs? Here we have to turn to scattered, very incomplete archaeological finds, the earliest of which create complex scientific challenges. Simply put, how does one distinguish the bones of a dog from those of a wolf? Most known remains of what may be early dogs are at best fragmentary, so one is working with inconspicuous clues. They provide us with a tantalizing portrait of animals that may have been part wolf, part dog.

The earliest possible domestic dog bones are a fragmentary skull from Goyet Cave in Belgium, claimed to date to about thirty-two thousand years ago, and a thirty-three-thousand-year-old tooth and jawbone fragment from Razboinichya Cave in the Altai Mountains of southern
Siberia, said to have a genetically “shallow divergence from ancient wolves.”
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Unfortunately, however, the Goyet cranium has no close association with human occupation, and the attribution is dubious. So Goyet is questionable at best. The geneticists working on the Razboinichya bones are rightly cautious about their findings, but it seems likely there was close interaction between wolves and humans much earlier than we now know.

Fortunately, there is more. Dozens of Late Ice Age archaeological sites with numerous mammoth bones occur in central and eastern Europe. Most lie on higher river terraces or in low, mountainous areas close to water. The huge beasts provided large quantities of meat, also materials for tools and ornaments. The bones formed stout frameworks for dome-shaped houses covered with mammoth hides. A hundred thousand years ago, the Neanderthals ate mammoth flesh but may have taken them only occasionally, perhaps in ambushes or when they were mired. After about forty-five thousand years ago, however, modern humans arrived with smaller, more effective weaponry that enabled them to attack mammoths from a greater distance. Pat Shipman, a specialist in ancient animal bones, theorizes that the hunters may also have used another weapon: fairly large, doglike animals morphologically distinct from wolves, whose much-fragmented bones lie among the game animals at mammoth kill sites. She calls them “dog-wolves,” canines with an unusual mitochondrial DNA, unknown among modern dogs or recent or ancient wolves. Males within this haplotype may have interbred with female wolves, leading to a population ancestral to either modern dogs or wolves. This may have been an early attempt at domestication, which left few, if any descendants.

At the time of writing, Shipman's “dog-wolves” are a shadowy presence, known only from fragmentary bones across Europe. If they existed, they would have been invaluable to people pursuing larger game. Like wolves, they would have surrounded lumbering mammoth or other large game, howling loudly and enabling the hunters to approach closely for the kill. They would also have served as guard dogs, keeping other predators away from the fresh meat being butchered and from the nearby dwellings. Dog-wolves might not have been trained hunting
animals, but their wolflike behavior of stalking and surrounding their prey in packs would have allowed effective hunting of mammoth and other formidable creatures, and better control of the resulting carcasses. The result could have been more food, then rising population densities, reflected in more mammoth kill sites. Perhaps, also, the larger-bodied dog-wolves could have transported meat from kill sites to camp, but this is pure speculation.
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The Shipman hypothesis, and the research of geneticists working on early dogs, assumes that there was a long twilight zone of wolf domestication that was more a matter of close cooperation than taming beasts that lived alongside people on a daily basis. The putative dog-wolves were extinct by the end of the Ice Age, for they differ significantly from later domesticated dogs. Whatever the closeness of their relationship to people, they offered clear advantages to their human neighbors in what must have been a loose relationship of interdependency based on respect and a need for meat supplies on both sides.

How Did Domestication Take Place?

Dog-wolves aside, we will never know exactly how full domestication came to pass. One obvious scenario has people adopting orphaned wolf puppies, which became pets and eventually dogs. They would have been fed alongside human babies, and then would have started breeding among themselves, producing “wolf puppies.” As the generations passed, they would have become ever more doglike. This hypothesis assumes that people captured pups on a considerable scale. It takes little account of how wolves behave around humans, of their innate, profound curiosity as social animals.

Captured wolf pups reared by people can be tamed and socialized to some extent, especially between the ages of three and eight months. These are the months when both dogs and wolves form their critical social bonds. According to biologist Raymond Coppinger, tame wolves would eat in the presence of humans; wild ones would not—a critical difference.
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This does not necessarily mean that tamed wolf pups became dogs, for this requires other major adaptations. First, the
animals have to sustain their foothold in the domestic arena, which requires them to become very much more like family members than wild animals. At the same time, dogs have a much greater tolerance of stress, which means that only a few wolf pups would adapt successfully. But the initial rearing did not mean that they had to be fully tamed or prevented from escaping. Both humans and wolves have remarkably similar hierarchical social organization, which revolves around the family and effective communication. These biological realities helped adapt stress-tolerant wolves to domestic life with people. By no means would all young wolves have melded readily into a society dominated by humans rather than fellow wolves. More aggressive individuals that did not adapt must have been killed or driven away into the wild.