The Last Two Times the World Warmed-4. Where Dogs Came From

Since the last ice age temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere spiked twice. This was the same period when humans domesticated plants and dogs.

Part I, Part II, Part III.

The Third Spike

After the last ice age there was a period from 14,700 years ago to 10,000 years ago during which temperatures in the northern hemisphere radically changed. They suddenly spiked, steadily declined, leveled off for a millennium, and then spiked again. Since then world temperatures have remained stable with small dips and waves for 10,000 years. That’s 10,000 good years. During these ten millennia humans have created pyramids, chariots, sailing ships, writing, printing presses, fossil fuel motors, and eventually rockets to the moon. But now—mostly due to those fossil fuel motors—climate stability is coming to an end. A third temperature spike is coming. Worst-case projections for this don’t approach the spikes our ancestors faced, nor the seesaw plunges, but that doesn’t mean we’re not in for a bumpy ride.¹

During our recent 10,000 years of climate stability nature was not the major player in changing human culture or political economy. With the coming fossil-fuel global warming nature will be a major player again.

Will climate change end civilization? No. Towns, agriculture, and economic specialization, i.e. civilization, is a pretty resilient mode of existence. But climate change will certainly end our civilization. Our specific global, petroleum-based, communications-interwoven civilization is built on connection and efficiency, not resilience. We don’t have layers of failsafes and back-up plans. The way our political economy is structured generates a vast wealth of automobiles, entertainment, and inexpensive consumer goods, but it’s also economically fragile, socially divisive, and culturally alienating. The problem isn’t “wokeness” or MAGA or the failure to live up to the “values” of the 60s or the 50s or whatever. Fossil-fuels, particularly petroleum, have inherent weaknesses as well as strengths. (Consider how the U.S. is currently collapsing despite being situated on a continent of navigable rivers, teaming natural resources, no enemies, and world economic preeminence. That predates Trump.)

So this series has been looking in on the lives of humans during previous periods of global warming—called the Bølling–Allerød and the Younger Dryas—to give us a sense of what might be ahead.

Homo Cyonides

In the first part we met the first really successful member of our lineage, Homo erectus. Call them Human 1.0. There were humans before Homo erectus, but they were too few and isolated to matter much in the story of the earth.² Then Home erectus communities emerged from Africa to migrate across most of the planet in their multifamily foraging bands using fire, language and stone tools, and diversifying into various descendant species. The variations between the descendant species, such as Homo neanderthalensis, Homo heidelbergensis, and Homo sapiens (us), don’t seem to have been particularly important. Some experts enjoy speculating about the differences as antiquarians enjoy identifying the variations in Victorian wallpaper, but it’s doubtful any human of any species would attract much attention if dressed, groomed, and plopped down in a supermarket.³ In the second and third parts of this series we sketched out that old-school hunter-gathering lifestyle common to all humans until global warming.

Today, we meet the next really successful type of human community. Call them Humans 2.0. This type of human community was not marked by genetic changes in humans but by genetic changes in our hunting-band doppelgangers, the wolves.

Humans and wolves got together, and the wolves became dogs, and that turned the humans into us. Wolves/dogs were the beginning our transformation from big game hunting nomadic bands into the cultivators and coordinators that we’ve been since. It can be hard to get a sense of what a big change this is—particularly since dogs today, while beloved as companions and employed as service animals and drug sniffers, aren’t critical for most economic activity.

But where did they come from? It seems that dogs didn’t happen because humans changed, but because wolves changed.

Left is an Indian Wolf which the Bonn–Oberkassel dog may have resembled. Right, a Husky.

The Wolf Pack

Our genus Homo is genetically much closer to the great apes—chimps, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans—but our story is far more like that of the genus Canis. Canis, the canids, means wolves, coyotes and eventually dogs. Coyotes are fascinating creatures in their own right, but they didn’t have much impact on humans, so we’ll leave them be.⁴

Wolves on the other hand are our closest analog. Wolves were successful a bit earlier than we were, apparently emerging from Asia rather than Africa, but like humans they migrated rapidly across the globe in hunting bands diversifying into various species. Like human bands, wolf bands are highly social, intelligent, and cooperative and can adapt to many ecological niches. Wolves and humans seem to have often hunted near one another as more than a dozen ice ages came and went. In colder climates both wolves and humans followed herds over the steppe. Both could adapt to woodland hunting too. Both could scavenge when necessary. Yet so far as we know during more than a million of years of coexistence, none of those earlier wolves or earlier humans ever domesticated one another.

Then during the Bølling–Allerød wolves from a particular non-extant species of Canis began to interact differently with groups of Homo sapiens leading in a very short time to a new biological relationship and dramatic morphological changes that gave the world a new species, Canis familiaris, i.e. the dog. Dogs are better at sensing human emotions than wolves—and far better than any ape—but not as smart at other kinds of problem solving. Dogs have facial muscles that allow them to make “sad eyes”—showing the whites of their eyes as humans do, but wolves don’t. Dogs enjoy playing and want to please humans even in adulthood, while wolves lose interest in both at about six months. In some ways dogs are wolves in a permanent state of adolescence.

In the suburb of Oberkassel outside Bonn, Germany archaeologists found the bones of one of the oldest undisputed domestic dogs buried with two humans. Its teeth showed signs of having survived infection, so it was cared for as a pet. But it wasn’t just a pet wolf. This Canis specimen was slender and would have looked something like a whippet. So it was not the offspring of a wild wolf. The site is what archeologists identify as the Magdalenian culture, and other dogs appear later in Magdalenian sites across Southern Europe. As we noted in Part I there is evidence of dogs among the Natufians as well.⁵

So how did that happen?

Domestication

Individual animals can have all sorts of interspecies friendships, humans can adopt and tame baby animals for pets (which wouldn’t normally breed unless they reached adulthood and wandered off), and certain ants keep other insects in a permanent parasitic state like a cross between domestication and slavery,⁶ but there is nothing in the story of mammals that is quite like the relationship between humans and dogs. It’s hard to picture how strange it is because we’re so used to it and because humans have gone on to domesticate so many other animals, it’s natural to assume that wolves were domesticated by a similar method.

In an experiment begun in 1952 in Novosibirsk, Russia, scientists Dmitry Belyayev and Lyudmila Trut carefully bred silver foxes over decades, selecting for tameness around humans.

After over 40 generations of breeding… Belyayev produced "a group of friendly, domesticated foxes who 'displayed behavioral, physiological, and anatomical characteristics that were not found in the wild population, or were found in wild foxes but with much lower frequency… Many of the domesticated foxes had floppy ears, short or curly tails, extended reproductive seasons, changes in fur coloration, and changes in the shape of their skulls, jaws, and teeth.⁷

Most of all they were comfortable around humans. Adults wagged tails, barked, liked having their bellies scratched, and some learned to fetch and sit. In short wild foxes became domesticated foxes.

One might assume this is how wolves became dogs, but most scientists doubt this. It couldn’t have just been humans adopting the friendliest wolves in each generation because there would be no way to keep the friendliest wolves from breeding with their less friendly packmates out there away from camp. The experiment depended on lots of cages and carefully controlled conditions, so foxes could be separated from humans and breeding partners, and then reintroduced over and over, generation after generation, and while that does seem to be how other animals were domesticated much later—when some human communities were more sedentary—there’s no evidence that hunter gatherers did anything like that. Or could do anything like that. Dog domestication seems to predate evidence of fences, cages, or houses built of materials that a wolf couldn’t dig through in five minutes.

For humans and wolves the process seems to have been more like domestication of plants. Plants it seems largely domesticated themselves.

The grass is always riper

Contrary to the information in the paleo diet, humans have always eaten grain. Just not a lot when grains were wild grasses. Picture a hillside of wild wheat or barley. The plants won’t be of equal height and won’t ripen at exactly the same time. For wild plants the grains come off the ears very easily so as to scatter in the wind or ride on the coat of a passing animal, but the stalks are tough. In contrast domesticated cereal plants tend to grow to the same height, ripen at the same time, and the stems are easier to cut, but the grains tend to cling to the ears rather than fall off easily. How did this change happen?

All of this makes harvesting better for humans, but it is not testament brilliance and patience of our hunter-gathering ancestors. They did not carefully breed plants to ripen at the same time, grow to the same height, develop stalks that could be cut easily, and grow grains that would cling to the ears so the ears could be carried back to a village without the grains being lost on the way.

Foragers know a lot about plants and know how plants grow, but aren’t going to be interested in painstakingly breeding particular wild grasses. Grasses just aren’t that big a part of their diet. But they know that when an area has been burned off by fire or flooded long enough to leave bare soil, whatever is planted first tends to thrive. So scattering some emmer or barley seeds after a flood recedes or a fire has burned a patch of ground gives our village or camp a nice stand of grain to reap without having to deal with a lot of weeds and other brush.

So whenever we’re reaping some wild grain, mostly to eat immediately, we can reap an extra bag or bunch to be stored as seeds to be scattered in this opportunistic way, after a river recedes or after we’ve burned off an area to attract deer.

Picture us as sedentary foragers like the Natufians. We’re not trying to reap a massive amount of grain to store and eat in the future. Grain is just one of dozens of seasonal food sources that we manage year around to supplement the game that is our major food. So on our rounds we’re gathering grain to eat tonight with a freshly-killed deer, and we might as well grab a second bundle to use as seeds.

Picture us in the patch of emmer. You bunch together several stalks and cut the stems with your stone knife. Then grab another bunch. I’m doing the same. We pile our cut stalks lengthwise to form sheaves. This is not a painstaking process. We’re not sharecroppers trying to reap all the grain. We don’t care if we miss almost all of it. We just each need one sheaf, one pile each to carry home. If a stem is too hard to cut, we skip it. We’ll be grabbing only plants that are ripe and we’ll tend to grab handfuls of plants that are roughly the same height. Once we each have a sheaf, tied with a stem string, we carry them over our shoulders back to our camp. A lot of the grain kernels will shake off the ears and be lost. We don’t care. Again this is all to supplement the deer meat and use to seed a clearing. By the time we’re home there’s still plenty to eat and sow.

Notice which seeds will remain to be planted by us next year! Seeds of plants that (1) are of the same height, (2) ripen at one particular time, (3) have stems that are fairly easy to cut, and (4) have seeds that cling to the ears. From the plants perspective we aren’t stealing, we’re helping. Plants benefit from having their seeds scattered in patches where they won’t be choked by weeds, so we humans are doing what they would want us to do. In the process new plants diverge from their sisters. Wild plants growing to the same height, ripening at the same time, and having seeds that don’t scatter easily into the wind would not prosper, but these new domesticated plants prosper in a mutually beneficial relationship with humans.⁸

Left: One physiological change between wolves and dogs is dogs have muscles allowing them to show "sad eyes" like humans. Wolves cannot do this. Right: Who's a good substack reader? Who is? Who is? That's a good substack reader!

Dog Day Afternoon

Scientists don’t know how wolves became domesticated, but most believe the pattern was more like cereal grasses than sheep. Though wolves and humans were moving in the same circles they weren’t necessarily competing. Humans were big game hunters living in small bands. Archeology attests that when kills happened, there was far more meat than a band could consume. In fact, because humans evolved a carnivore diet somewhat late in our history we can’t live purely on animal protein as wolves do. Since the steppe didn’t have as much edible vegetable matter as warmer climates humans needed to eat a lot of fat (as Inuit and other polar people have in historical times) so there was plenty of meat to spare with every kill. Even in the ice age humans and wolves might have coexisted profitably with wolves enjoying the meat that the humans couldn’t finish.

When the temperature warmed and the forests expanded wolves could have helped humans flush out and retrieve game in the forest. Or in the forests humans may have started eating wolves, since they would have been nearby, but kept the more friendly, cooperative ones as pets. But that doesn’t explain how the pet wolves could have been kept from breeding with the wild ones since it’s not plausible that humans could have killed all of them.

So why didn’t it happen earlier?⁹ As with agriculture why didn’t Homo sapiens domesticate dogs after the previous ice age? Why didn’t other humans domesticate dogs before or after the ice ages that came before that. For that matter why didn’t Homo erectus domesticate dogs a million years ago? Maybe changes in the climate in the Bølling–Allerød changed animal territories and disease vectors and lots of wolves were dying of some disease.

I don’t know. But the addition of dogs to human hunting bands is what has allowed humans to rule the world far more than any proposed cognitive mutation. A band of dorky, dumb humans with dogs is far more adaptable and resilient than a band of humans without dogs, regardless of how smart of strong they are. Or maybe that doesn’t matter at all. Maybe the whole competitive framework is wrong. We’ll consider that in the next chapter of this series as the Bølling–Allerød comes to an end and we reach the Younger Dryas.

But first another true story about departures, and then more about coal.

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1. Which doesn’t mean our situation is the same. Those two early spikes rose from two hellishly cold base periods. A literal ice age, and a period with temperatures as cold as an ice age (but not lasting long enough to earn the label). Our fossil-fuel-induced global warming is starting from a far higher base level. It’s theoretically possible that since the planet is already in a warm phase the carbon dioxide melts enough permafrost to release enough methane—which heats the atmosphere more than carbon dioxide—to make the planet unlivable for large mammals or at least for complex civilizations such as ours. But probably not. It’s also theoretically possible that climate changes disrupt the world economy enough or we run out of fossil fuel soon enough that temperatures gradually peeter out on their own. But also probably not.

2. Homo habilis (an ancestor of homo erectus) would just be a weird walking ape if one didn’t know the storied history of her descendants.

3. Homo erectus’ speech would have sounded odd to modern ears since their anatomy was different enough to produce different (fewer?) vowels.

4. The reason I could never be a real scholar or scientist is I can barely resist inserting jokes about Wile E Coyote ordering portable holes from ACME. By the way, I was shocked to discover portable holes did not orginate in Roadrunner cartoons.

5. There are older possible remains of genetically distinct dogs, but these are disputed (as I understand it). Certainly, it wasn’t until our period that dogs became widespread.

6. This is often called slavery, but slavery would actually involve the same species. Then again, it’s not really domestication as I understand itsince the victim ants don’t reproduce.

7. The quote comes from Wikipedia, but I first became interested in domesticated foxes, and this whole topic, from an article in Smithsonian. But I’m sure it long preceded this one.

8. Domestication means that a plant or animal has a relationship with an animal species, the domesticator, in which the domesticator is in control but to the benefit of both. For example leafcutter ants farm certain fungi. They feed the fungi and harvest it. This is somewhat different from #5 above.

9. Although dogs have since interbred with various species of wolves, geneticists tell us that all dogs are mostly descended from one original Pleistocene wolf species, they think in a single event. Although I remember when geneticists were adamantly sure that Homo sapiens never interbred with Neanderthals and that has proven to be wrong.