When books are published there are inevitable compromises. As a writer I might think something is interesting but that may not always be the same as what an editor (or a publisher's accountant) thinks is important. For those of you who enjoyed Mark Derr's book, How The Dog Became The Dog, and would like more facts or hypotheses, the following pages are those that didn't make it into a chapter titled How Dogs Became Dogs from my book Dog.
Dogs
migrate out of Asia
The first dogs were
much of a muchness. No one knows what their hair was like – what colours
existed or whether it was always the same length and texture – but their
skeletons were all roughly similar. The majority of biologists say that around
14,000 years ago, when human culture made its transition from hunter-gatherer
to a more sedentary lifestyle, that this created new selection pressures on
dogs breeding. Now there were only smaller game to capture around human
settlements because humans had captured the larger game and scavenging was now
from less nourishing waste from settled human communities. These new realities
lead to alterations in their skeletal structure that physically differentiated
“proto-dogs” from local wolf populations. Their teeth became smaller and more
crowded than the wolf’s and their muzzles narrower. Curiously and inexplicably,
the sinuses in the skull increased in size, so dogs looked ‘brainer’ than
wolves but (don’t let your dog know) the cavity in the skull for the brain
became about one-third smaller. The dog’s brain became and still is
considerably smaller than the brain of a wolf that’s the same size but that
doesn’t mean its brain deteriorated. In fact, it improved.
I’ll explain how dogs
learn in Chapter Nine but briefly there are a variety of learning centres in
the brain. The wolf needed extensive brain power to mentally map large
territories. It also needed brain power to determine where it was safe to build
a den, where it was most productive to hunt, how best to climb the pecking
order and who it was best to mate with.?Domestication reduced the need for
efficiency in these learning centres while at the same time it increased the
need for efficiency of other learning centres, for example, how to live and
work compatibly with another species (us), how to inhibit predatory aggression
towards other species (our livestock) and, better than any other species, how
to read our intentions, to understand what we said with our voices or signalled
we wanted with no more than a nod of the head or a look in the eye.
There were fewer
dangers from other larger, carnivorous predators when den sites were around
human settlements, so coat camouflage became less important, but there was one
increased danger, the risk of capture by people. Captured adults were eaten
immediately while pups were probably raised and fattened before they too were
eaten. Some of these captives survived into adulthood and mated but now that
happened under the authority and control of people. This was the true beginning
of planned breeding, when we took control of the dog’s destiny.?Descendents of
these dingo-sized ‘first dogs’ accompanied people as they traded, migrated or
invaded. They rapidly spread throughout Asia, north into Siberia, west into
Arabia, the Middle East, Europe and Africa and south into the Indo-Malay
regions. As humans populated new areas of the world, the Americas, Australia
and finally Polynesia and New Zealand, dogs accompanied them. These first dogs
served a simple purpose. They were a ready source of food and their pups were
possibly a local alarm system.
Pups weren’t much
different then to what they are now. Nor were our ancestors’ instinctive
reactions much different to ours. Let me give you a relatively modern but I
think relevant example. A little less than 200 years ago, in 1828, a major in
the British Army, visited the Aboriginal people living on Stradbroke Island off
the coast of what is now Queensland, Australia. He saw a dingo pup, admired its
unusual dark colour and tried to buy it from his Aboriginal owner. This was one
of the first meetings between the island’s native inhabitants and Europeans and
this is what Major Lockyer wrote in his diary.?“I was very anxious to get one
of the wild native breed of black colour, a very handsome puppy, which one of
the men had in his arms. I offered him a small axe for it; his companions urged
him to take it, and he was about to do so, when he looked at the dog and the
animal licked his face, which settled the business. He shook his head and
determined to keep him.”
Aboriginal or
European, we were suckers then, as we are now for a pup’s inherent behaviour,
especially the lick on the face. That’s a puppy behaviour we’ve intentionally
perpetuated into adulthood in so many dogs. As our ancestors evolved from
hunter-gatherers to living in settled communities young pups would have offered
amusement, even companionship although it would be thousands of years more
before they efficiently assisted humans with hunting or herding.