The Hunting Symbiosis Model of Dog Domestication

 

A lot of discussion about dog domestication is a debate between the scavenger vs. the hunting-symbiosis model.

  I don't think the scavenging model is well-supported from the empirical reality of when it appears dogs where domesticated.  Virtually all genetic data supports a domestication of the dog thousands of years before humans engaged in agriculture. Agricultural society currently has created a surplus where things like coyotes, raccoons, red foxes, and even some wolf populations engage in widespread scavenging of our waste. Hunter-gatherers simply didn't have enough food waste to feed scavenging wolves that could somehow evolve into dogs.

There have been some attempts in the past month to make this model viable again.  A paper was recently published in Nature that points out that humans have a very hard time digesting excess protein from their kills. Humans require fat from meat to power our freakishly large brains, but excess protein is a real problem for us. The authors contend that wolves would have scavenged the lean cuts of meat, and humans would have eaten the fattier ones.

Thus, because humans and wolves would have preferred different parts of the animal, humans would have created a glut of waste in lean meat, which the wolves would have devoured. 

I think this is still a bit of stretch, and I think it points more toward the hunting-symbiosis model of dog domestication. 

The fact that humans and wolves would have preferred different parts of the animal shows how this symbiosis could have been maintained much more easily than the fanciful notion that people were leaving garbage heaps of lean meat cuts.

I think the story of dog domestication began with a long-term relationship between wolves and people. I think it may have gone something like this: 

Wolves often test ungulate prey. Generally if prey is healthy, it stands and faces the wolves. If it is not healthy, it runs, and the wolves run it down and kill it. 

Healthy animals are likely to have good amounts of fat on them, which hunting humans would need to power their brains, but healthy animals are by definition hard to kill.

Wolves harrying and testing quarry, which do two things for these hunters. When the quarry stands to face the wolves, it becomes distracted and more stationary-- and much easier to hit with a thrown spear. The health of the animal that would give it it the guts to stand and face the wolves would make it more vulnerable. 

This way of hunting with wolves is suggested in Pat Shipman's The Invaders.  She contends that European hunters would use wolves to bay up mammoths, distracting them them the human approach and making them easier to kill. 

This hunting technique is not at all dissimilar to how Scandinavian hunters use elkhounds. The dogs distract the large cervids (better known to North Americans as moose). The distracted and mostly stationary moose is then more easily taken with a rifle. 

That humans have a hard time digesting and metabolizing lean protein actually points more towards the hunting symbiosis model for dog domestication, a idea explored more thoroughly in Pierotti and Fogg's First Domestication. 

Wolves and ravens have been observed cooperatively hunting together. The ravens will search from the sky, looking for a weakened moose or caribou. The wolves then kill the weakened animal, and both the wolves and ravens get a chance at the kill.

It makes sense that wolves, which had not yet undergone the brutal selection that agricultural and industrial man performed upon the species in more recent centuries, would have been more than willing to engage humans in the same way. And humans would have found this method of hunting was a great way to get fatty meat very easily.

So it makes sense that humans and wolves could have worked together, perhaps for tens of thousands of years, until there was ever a discernable creature that we might call a dog.

The antiquity of dogs means we are forced to consider that cooperative hunting played a vital role in their evolution and eventual domestication.

To do otherwise is engage in a sort of logical gymnastics that makes one look quite a bit foolish.

So it began with bay dogs in a world of ice and snow.