Man and his Wolf

Man and His Wolf.

Sometime, an awfully long time ago, in some place, nobody knows exactly where or when, something remarkable happened. It may have happened lots of times in many different places; an almost inevitable collusion that was somehow destined to occur. Nevertheless it was remarkable and singular in its occurrence. Two predatory species found each other and formed a bonding; a cooperative partnership virtually unique within nature. One was a canine quadruped, Canis lupus, the Grey Wolf; the other a bipedal primate, Homo sapiens, us. It was a marriage quite unlike anything else in the world.

Although we can never be certain as to how exactly this bond was formed we can make some intelligent guesses based on the evidence we have. Since the partnership was formed long before the advent of recorded history we have to rely on archaeological evidence and the evidence of mitochondrial DNA. The trouble is that these give us some conflicting results. The wolf evolved into an entire sub-species with its association with human beings but just when this split occurred is difficult to pin down with any great accuracy. The archaeological evidence is pretty thin on the ground for the early years of this partnership and archaeologists are frequently obliged to make assumptions on the basis of only a very few samples.

We know with certainty that our familiar sub-species of the wolf can be traced back to something like 15,000 years ago. It appears from the DNA record that the current lineage of domestic wolves is descended from examples recruited from around that time particularly in Europe and Siberia. This is by no means an end of the debate however. The earliest remains of what were undoubtedly domesticated wolves are dated accurately at around 33,000 years ago. This lineage however seems to have disappeared and it is probable that none of that line survived the last great ice age maximum. The partnership may even be older. Some DNA evidence has been interpreted to indicate that the divergence between the nominate species of wolf and the domestic sub-species may have occurred anywhere between 40,000 and 100,000 or even 140,00years ago. The human sub-species (Homo sapiens sapiens) to which we belong only achieved full anatomical modernity around 200,000 years ago and didn’t reach full behavioural modernity until around 50,000 years ago so it is quite possible that for as nearly as long as we have walked the surface of this world the wolf has walked by our side.

How did this marriage happen? Both humans and wolves were predators; rivals for the same game. Both were capable of harming the other. They were competitors. A more unlikely partnership would have been hard to find you would have thought. What on earth brought the two species together and why was it so advantageous to both? To understand that I think we need to understand a little about the early human culture from which we emerged.

Strip all the veneers of civilisation away and pare us back to our primitive past and the partnership seems less unlikely. Up until the advent of cultivation and the subsequent dawn of civilisation, humans lived in small familial or social groups of hunter gatherers; nomadic packs which slept together, hunted together and played together. Take away our tool making technology and behaviourally we were uncannily like wolves! The resemblance in our behaviour would have been obvious to early humans. We could look into the eyes of a wolf and see a kindred spirit. They did everything we did bar light fires and make spears.

To early cultures too wolves would have been familiar creatures. They were far more numerous back then and indeed there were probably far more wolves than humans. They may occasionally have been competitors for the same prey but they almost certainly rarely if ever preyed on humans. Attacks by wolves on humans are very rare indeed and most recorded are defensive attacks such as a she-wolf defending her young. In nature predatory mammals very rarely prey on other predators and especially not on ones as big if not bigger than themselves and even meaner. It’s just not sensible survival policy. Wolves are very successful hunters but, in the face of human beings, they were up against the most terrifying predator on the plant; the velociraptor of the age of mammals, capable of killing anything that crossed its path. You wouldn’t attack such a creature. You’d run like hell as soon as you saw one.

But some wolves didn’t and this is where the partnership began to form. Wolves, in common with all canine species and many predators for that matter, are nothing if not opportunistic. Packs of hunting humans were very good at bringing down large prey. They were even good at mass slaughter. We know they drove frightened herds of prey over cliffs for instance. Since such early bands had only limited means of preserving food, they inevitably killed more than they could consume. Wolves would have known this. There would have been the carcasses of human kills to scavenge on once the primary hunters had taken their fill. Wolves are intelligent creatures. Following hunting bands of humans provided an easy source of food. We can imagine a pack of wolves tracking human hunting parties waiting on the periphery in the hopes of dining off the remains of their kill. We can see a group of early humans sat around their camp fire by night feeding off the day’s prey while a pack of wolves stalked around the edges hoping to pick up some titbits. The humans probably chucked their discarded bones out of the circle around the fire for the wolves to squabble over.

In this strategy survival depended on boldness. Probably the first change to come upon the wolf was a change in its flight behaviour. Success in foraging off human camps came to those wolves whose instinct to flee became lessened and were the boldest in approaching humans. In this way survival favoured a growing closeness and familiarity. It would soon have become the case therefore that any nomadic pack of humans was followed constantly by an accompanying pack of opportunistic wolves. From this early beginning the seeds of cooperation were formed.

Some years ago I had a personal insight into how this might have happened. A lover and I were on a camping holiday in the Algarve in Southern Portugal. That part of Portugal swarmed with feral dogs; smallish brown dogs that seemed to be all over the place. This was a pretty wretched population of canines to tell the truth. They were half starved scavengers and pretty badly treated by the local people generally. One of these little dogs, a bit bolder than the others, began to hang around us when we cooked food outside our tent. The poor thing was so emaciated that, being the soft hearted people we were, we started throwing scraps to it and the remains of out meals. After that we couldn’t get rid of it! Even when we went for walks along the spectacular sea cliffs of the Sagres the little dog would be padding along behind us somewhere. Soon it went from being a nuisance to being our constant companion. We even started to buy dog food at the shop for it and it was trying to crawl into our tent on a night to sleep with us. It took upon itself the role of protector of our tent as well, rushing out to bark at any intruder coming too close. By the end of the holiday we’d even given him a name and were agonising over what to do with him when our holiday ended. We’d grown so fond of the endearing little creature that we finally resolved to take him home with us. It never happened. On the last day of our holiday we were late rising and he wandered off on spec. He never turned up when we cooked breakfast and we worried about him and went looking. We found him by the roadside outside the campsite. He’d been killed by a passing car; the fate of many feral dogs in Portugal. I can still feel the twinges of anguish in the memory of that discovery to this day.

So it can be easily understood how the familiarity between people and their shadowing wolves grew. It is easy to see how soon the wolves would be sleeping within the camp sites of these nomadic people, their pups playing with the c***dren, the adults squabbling over left overs and bones. It is also easy to realise how quickly the arrangement became mutually beneficial to both species. It was an easy step from proximity and familiarity to close understanding and cooperation. Soon the wolves would not just be accompanying the hunters on their forays but actively participating in the hunt as well; their keen noses and hearing helping to track prey and their speed and mobility used to drive prey onto the waiting spears of their human partners. These same facilities would have made them invaluable for guarding the camp by night and warning of intruders. The people might have even used their wolves’ bodies for warmth on cold nights. There is to this day a saying among Australian aborigines, “a three dog night” to describe a cold night.

For their part the advantages to the wolves would have been enormous too for their human partners could kill far more food and, just as importantly carry far more. It meant less expenditure of energy for hunting: more reliable sources of food; even the warmth of human fires. Humans would have taken wolf puppies and raised them. The puppies would grow up considering that the people were their pack; their family. The two species had found each, discovered that they worked very well together and forged a partnership that has thrived ever since.

It was not just a marriage of convenience either. Wolves are fiercely loyal creatures and this loyalty was reciprocated by their human partners. These early humans loved their wolves. Archaeologists have found graves of primitive hunter gatherers who were buried with their dog alongside them. There are other graves where a beloved dog is buried with a mammoth bone clamped in its teeth presumably to sustain it on its journey to the afterlife. This was more than just cooperation and mutual advantage. This was a marriage of love.

It was a marriage that lasted too, for wherever human beings have wandered in this world (and they wandered to most places) they took their wolves with them. The first humans arrived in the Americas around 15-12 thousand years ago. Some believe they may have recruited wolves from the indigenous populations of North America but others consider it more likely that they brought them with them; that in fact their wolves pulled their sleds across the frigid ice fields of the Bering Straits. Wolves have gone everywhere with us. On occasion they have even been our emissaries before us into realms we have not stepped. The first astronaut in space was not a man but a wolf; the Soviet dog Laika who travelled into orbit aboard Sputnik 2 in 1957.

The big change came as humans learned the trick of agriculture and a****l husbandry. They left their nomadic ways behind and settled onto farms, into villages, then towns and finally the cities of civilisation. They learned the trick of selective breeding and their wolves became more and more specialised for different purposes and less and less like their wild cousins in appearance. Yet they are still wolves. The domestic dog is nothing more than a sub-species of the Grey Wolf. The Grey wolf is Canis lupus, your spaniel is Canis lupus familiaris; the familiar wolf. That is true of all of them, from a lady’s poodle on the streets of Paris to an Inuit’s team of huskies in Nothern Canada; from a Chihuahua to a Great Dane. They are wolves; the a****l that teamed up with us at the dawn of our existence.

The wolf has insinuated itself not only into our homes and hearts but also into our myth and folklore. Few creatures feature more heavily than the wolf. If it was easy to see humans raising wolf puppies it was no great stretch of imagination to imagine wolves raising human cubs. Everybody knows such stories. Romulus and Remus are the most famous example. And if wolves and humans are so alike behaviourally then it is easy to see how they became interchangeable in folklore. It is almost a cliché to this day that a person and their dog become so attuned to each other behaviourally that in some indefinable way that start to even resemble each other. From there it was a small step to see how they could even become one another. The werewolf or wolf-man has an ancient history in folklore. Lycaon was the King of Arcadia turned into a wolf by the God Zeus and who founded the city of Lycosura.

It’s been a damn successful partnership too. There are an estimated 400 million domestic dogs in the world making them the most successful large terrestrial predator on the planet after man. The numbers far exceed their wild cousins of the nominate species.

Somehow therefore I find it the most disgracefully reprehensible thing for people to mistreat dogs and equally as abhorrent to persecute their wild cousins. Let’s be honest about this; there are few creatures that share this planet with us which we can truly count among our friends. The wolf is our oldest and truest friend of all. We should cherish them.

Michaela