The dog-human connection in evolution

Posted on August 23, 2010 by gregdowney

Evolutionary theorists have long recognized that the domestication of

animals represented a major change in human life, providing not just a close-at-hand
food source, but also non-human muscle power and a host of other advantages. Penn
State anthropologist Prof. Pat Shipman argues that animal domestication is one
manifestation of a larger distinctive trait of our species, the animal connection,
which unites and underwrites a number of the most important evolutionary
advances of our hominin ancestors.

Louis

Shipmans proposal is discussed in a recent forum paper in Current Anthropology and

is the subject of her forthcoming book, The Animal Connection. The paper is
interesting to us here at Neuroanthropology.net because Shipman indirectly poses
fascinating questions about the evolutionary significance of human-animal
relationships, including the cognitive abilities of both and how they interact.

As Shipman puts it in the Penn State press release about the research, if we only think
about what domesticated animals do for us as a species, we miss the truly curious
thing about our relationship to them:

No other mammal routinely adopts other species in the wild no gazelles take in
baby cheetahs, no mountain lions raise baby deer. Every mouthful you feed to
another species is one that your own children do not eat. On the face of it, caring for
another species is maladaptive, so why do we humans do this?

Although researchers working on symbiotic inter-species relationships might

highlight that the support of other species hardly requires adopting their young and
feeding them canned kitten food (a critique Travis Pickering levels in his comments),
Shipmans statement highlights nicely that human-animal inter-species relationships
seem to extend beyond merely treating them as tameable prey or means to a human
end. But then again, this super-instrumentality could be ascribed to a large number of
human traits.

The domestication of animals wasnt merely about capturing a buffet-on-the-hoof,

from Shipmans perspective, but the continuation of a long-term evolutionary
project by our species to study animals, first when we were prey for them, and
later as predators ourselves.

One of the clinchers for her argument is that the first animals domesticated were
not food sources, but a fellow predator and scavenger: the wolf (dogs being
descendants of wolves, even a subspecies by some reckoning). Clearly, domestication
wasnt first about eating the animal:

Shipman suggests, instead, that the primary impetus for domestication was to
transform animals we had been observing intently for millennia into living tools
during their peak years, then only later using their meat as food. As living tools,
different domestic animals offer immense renewable resources for tasks such as
tracking game, destroying rodents, protecting kin and goods, providing wool for
warmth, moving humans and goods over long distances, and providing milk to human
infants she said. (again, from the press release.)

Overall, Shipmans thesis is an interesting one, stronger in relation some eras than in
others, in part because the implications, at an abstract level, can be quite vague. But I
think her analytical framework is very much worth considering as it shifts some of the
evolutionary theoretical discussions about hominin advances. Often, evolutionary
theorists can treat the advent of tools or the domestication of plants as a rational
advance brought on by purely cognitive means: an exclusively human community
made a kind of technologically-available-means-ends calculation.

Shipmans discussion, instead, focuses our attention on how humans might have been
perceiving the world, and their place among a variety of species, not just in relations
to other hominids. Considering how complex relations with animals might influence
human foraging strategies, technology, and perhaps even symbolic functions is a
useful new angle on a number of questions.

Ive been thinking a lot about dogs lately (more on this), so considering the cognitive
dimensions of our evolutionary relationship to animals is particularly relevant to me,
but most specifically about dogs rather than other domesticates. Im not sure Im
wholly persuaded by Shipmans main point, which seems to be that the animal
connection is driving the last several million years of human evolutionary
development, but I do like very much how her perspective opens up a whole set of
really intriguing theoretical questions.

Dog blogging and my canine connection

Dogs are on my mind, not merely because theyre my best friends (really), but also
because I have an honours student doing a year-long research project on dog-human
interaction in sheepherding trials.

One of the great things about being an academic advisor is working with intensely
bright undergraduates. The collaboration can help remind the jaded researcher of just
how great we have it, pursuing our curiosities and intellectual obsessions wherever
they might lead. This year, Im in the enviable position of working with three
extremely sharp undergraduates doing their honours theses, which is like a senior year
of the undergraduate career almost wholly devoted to a single long original project.

Dog man is Paul Keil, an impressive interdisciplinary thinker who, to our delight, is
completing his thesis in the Department of Anthropology, but also works as a research
assistant in the Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science. Besides his project on dogs,
hes also helping on some research on collective memory and other issues in cognitive
science.

Paul first brought the Shipman article to my attention when he must have gotten a pre-
publication look at it from someone connected to Current Anthropology. This is the
abstract:

A suite of unique physical and behavioral characteristics distinguishes Homo sapiens

from other mammals. Three diagnostic human behaviors played key roles in human
evolution: tool making, symbolic behavior and language, and the domestication of
plants and animals. I focus here on a previously unrecognized fourth behavior, which
I call the animal connection, that characterized the human lineage over the past 2.6
million years. I propose that the animal connection is the underlying link among the
other key human behaviors and that it substantially influenced the evolution of
humans.

Shipmans hypothesis

In the introduction to the article, Shipman suggests that three key innovations are
normally treated as hallmarks of our species: tool use, symbolic thought, and food
domestication.

I hypothesize that a fourth trait, the animal connection, is an equally important and
diagnostic behavior of humans and that the animal connection unites tool making,
symbolic behavior and language, and domestication into an adaptive package.

In fact, Id say that theres a few other hallmarks, but some of these are less clearly
linked to the animal connection which is Shipmans ultimate goal; one could cite
bipedalism, adaptation to heat and long-distance movement, dietary versatility,
complex social structures
The exercise of isolating the human-ness from all other animals essences is not a
terribly interesting one to me. Just because other animals do something (like use tools
or communicate) doesnt mean that humans behaviours are any less odd or
interesting.

Shipman sees this animal-human connection as beginning first with hominin

observation of animals as prey (although also, presumably, our ancestors would have
also worried about animals predator, to avoid or deter).

The animal connection comprises an increasingly intimate and reciprocal set of

interactions between animals and humans (i.e., members of the genus Homo) starting
2.6 million years ago (mya). The animal connection began with the exploitation and
observation of animals by humans. Over time, regular social interactions were
incorporated into the animal connection. This trait is expressed today in the
widespread adoption, or cross-species alloparenting, of animalsincluding dingoes,
possums, bandicoots, raccoons, deer, moose, bison, fruit bats, lizards, bears, tapir,
monkeys, sloths, coatimundis, antelopes, zebra, tree kangaroos, rabbits, weasels,
ferrets, rodents, and birds, cervids, felids, and canids of all typesas members of
the family.

The list of animals with which we sometimes have alloparenting relationships is

impressive, suggesting not merely that humans have been capable of domesticating all
sorts of animals, but also that were pretty generous about providing a space in our
communities and flexible enough to support a wide variation in animal behaviour. To
put it bluntly, were pretty easy for an animal to counter-domesticate (or whatever
you want to call what theyre doing to us as were domesticating them).

Spud (friend's puppy) with my hand

We can be trained by animals of many sorts to provide them with appropriate

housing, food, interaction, and other support. As Shipman describes, we will go to
all sorts of extremes, even breast-feeding animals, pre-chewing their food, or
purchasing outrageously expensive gourmet dog biscuits and fuzzy little sweaters
with matching booties in order to keep our animals from running off to seek for more
congenial living arrangements.

This two-way argument has also been made by theorists like Peter Bleed (2006),
pointing out that focusing on the animal-human relationship as wholly driven by
human domination underestimates the degree to which the little buggers have us
where they want us (I mean, look at Spud you want to say no to that?). As early as
the work of Zeuner (1963), theorists pointed out that the human-dog relationship was
not like other dynamics of domestication, and that dogs themselves may have
initiated a process that led to their eventual domestication by living commensally,
or following along with humans and slowly adapting to life with our type, rather
than by simply being the passive victims of human projects to dominate and shape
animals.

Shipmans approach is helpful in thinking about dogs in that she doesnt draw such a
stark divide between wild and domesticated animals, stressing instead the
continuity in human ability to understand, observe and use animals. Similarly,
Peter Bleed (2008) points out that a reconsideration by paleoanthropologists and
evolutionary theorists of the transition between foraging and farming has also found
continuity rather than an absolute and categorical divide.

Other hallmarks of humanity

Shipman goes on to review three other, more widely accepted hallmarks of human
distinctiveness: tool use, symbolic language and domestication. She repeats the classic
anthropological discussion by Leslie White of tool use as extrasomatic adaptation, or
outside-the-skin forms of adaptation:

Tool using in the broad sense is an extrasomatic adaptation (White 1959) of humans: a
means by which humans evolved behaviorally without adapting physically.

As some long-time readers will realize, Im not entirely comfortable with Whites
terminology because I feel the hard-and-fast line between behaviour and biology,
technological and physiological adaptation, obscures the ways that tools shape
the human nervous system and body. To say that a tool is extrasomatic or outside
the body denies the ways that tools influence bodily development, whether its
skeletal asymmetry or increased sensitivity in the thumbs of videogame players.

Stone tools are not easy to use or to manufacture, I would argue; chimpanzees, for
example, have a very hard time manufacturing stone tools even when they are shown
how to do it, because the manual skills involved bringing high energy percussion
precisely onto the tools surface require great dexterity, eye-hand coordination, and
trainability. But this is an argument for a different post back to animals.

Shipman discusses a wide range of symbolic behaviour ritual, language, art, objects
of personal adornment, and the use of ochre and pigments as indicative of a
distinctively human way of life. The difference between human symbolic behaviour,
especially language, and animal communication has been discussed extensively in the
anthropological literature, and a wide range of traits has been suggested as
distinguishing the two. The arbitrariness of linguistic signs, the ability to generate
greater complexity with grammar, the disambiguation possible with spoken words, the
greater abstractness and ability to discuss non-concrete subjects or absent objects,
rather than just index elements in the immediate environment, all stand out as critical.

Finally, beginning as early as around 15,000 bp, humans domesticated plants and
animals, giving our ancestors control over food sources, making sedentary life
possible, and eventually producing specialization and surplus labour, the foundation
for civilization and more rapid technological change.

As Shipman points out, following Clutton-Brock (1999), domesticating animals is

significantly different from domesticating plants as it requires shaping animal
behaviour as well as morphology, learning to interact with the animals instincts
and capacities: Domesticating an animal is fundamentally developing a means of
communication with that animal (Shipman 2010). In contrast, humans do not have
reciprocal, individual relationships with the plants that we grow.

The connection between humans and animals must have been quite intimate, Shipman
argues, as zoogenic diseases crossed over into human populations, and we know from
ethnographic research that humans and domesticated animals often live under the
same roof or in the same compounds.

The modern human-animal connection

Spud 'bites the hand...'

Shipman argues that this long evolutionary interaction with other animals has
reinforced a distinctive openness to mutual relationships in humans, which we
can see in a host of contemporary traits. Shipman draws out evidence of the positive
health benefits of pet ownership, for example, to highlight the role animal-human
relationships play in our lives, and points to the more intensive examples of helping
dogs and therapeutic pets.
From the contrast between the rarity of alloparenting between species among other
wild mammals and of feral children being raised by animals, Shipman concludes that
the animal-human connection is essential to our species:

From this evidence, I conclude that adopting and nurturing individuals of another
species is an extremely rare behavior among nonhumans, whereas the animal
connection is a universal human behavior. In summary, the animal connection clearly
is a universal human trait with a fundamental and enormous effect on human well-
being.

Shipman cites statistics on household ownership of pets and expenditures on pets as

demonstrating the universality of the human-animal connection. In fact, the picture
on this, I think, is a bit more ambivalent and even trending in the wrong direction for
her argument.

In Japan, for example, highly urbanized populations have lower pet ownership rates:
the rate is as low as 20% of households. In parts of the US and Australia, rates are
much higher (around 62% of households in the US and 63% in Australia have pets),
but these rates have fallen from as high as 85% in some rural regions. (Im pulling
some of my information off the Australian Companion Animal Council report,
Contribution of the Pet Care industry to the Australian economy, 7th edition, 2010,
and the 2009/2010 AAPA National Pet Owners Survey (US), not a free download.)

Like I said, Im sympathetic to Shipmans discussion, but I still run up against my

own reservations about declaring things universal when they are, in fact, quite rare
in some societies. Im just not sure why we need to make such an easily falsifiable
over-reaching claim when the observation of patterns of human-animal nurturing is,
regardless of universality, incredibly interesting.

The animal connection as evolutionary driver

In her account of human evolutionary developments, especially the advent of tool use,
symbolic activity and animal domestication, theres little serious to dispute; although
some dates are still subject to debate, which commentators like Richard Klein point
out, and other theorists might share my reservations about specific terms (like
extrasomatic adaptation), the general outline is relatively well agreed upon and
many familiar landmarks appear in Shipmans outline.

Where Shipmans evolutionary account starts to depart significantly from a

consensus in the field is to point out the presence of animals and animal-human
relations in the other three evolutionary milestone processes. She makes the case,
not just to include animal-human connection among other defining traits, but as a
foundation for the other major changes in hominin lifeways.

I hypothesize that as an ancient, diagnostic trait of the human lineage, the animal
connection had a major influence on human evolution, genetics, and behavior. This
hypothesis predicts that the fossil and archaeological record will include abundant
evidence that (1) humans were intimately and persistently connected with animals, (2)
human adaptive changes were causally linked to the animal connection, and (3) a
meaningful adaptive advantage of the animal connection can be identified in each
stage of human evolution.

Shipman first points to the advent of stone tools themselves, the fact that their
development would have made our ancestors as much predator as prey, as the first
step in the emergence of the animal-human connection. As hominins became more
predatory, they would have to study both prey animals and fellow, competing
predators, both to better acquire food and to fight off rivals.

The change in diet from primarily herbivore or opportunistic, carrion-eating

omnivore to confident hunting predator was an extraordinary shift in relation to
other animals, as Shipman points out in her response to other commentators:

Ecologically, making a transition from a largely herbivorous or even omnivorous

niche to a predatory one is of tremendous importance. There are few examples in the
mammalian world of species that have made such a transition, perhaps because it has
such momentous consequences.

Louis comes home with us

The human-animal connection propelled human evolution later, according to Shipman

when between 200 kya and 40 kya, evidence of technological and cultural change
suggest the development of more sophisticated modes of communication, including
language and symbols. Shipman again argues for the influence of animals on human
evolution, as more sophisticated, broad-based foraging required the memory and
transmission of more extensive information. The process is most evident in cave
paintings, Shipman suggests, where the evidence is not simply that many, if not most
of the paintings are of animals:

What is not depicted in any recognizable fashion is also key: there are no landscapes,
no depictions of geographic features (mountains, water sources), no dwellings or
shelters, and nothing about climate or weather. Rarely depicted subjects include
humans, insects, small animals, birds, plants, reptiles, nuts, fruit, berries, or tubers
Thus, the overwhelming frequency of animal depictions, coupled with the expanded
exploitation of animal resources, indicates the increasing value of the animal
connection.

Shipman points out that images of animals in cave paintings took more than just a
little effort pigments were costly in terms of resources as they often were carried
long distances, mined, mixed with binding agents that might also be rare. Their use
suggests, in the words of other theorists, that our ancestors were informavores, my
new word for the day.

Although most current discussions of the evolution of human intelligence focus on its
usefulness in intra-species social interaction (for example, Robin Dunbar), Shipman
highlights that these early representations do not feature human social
interaction though they could but rather symbolically salient animals. From
cave paintings, we see a community intelligence and visual code focused intensely on
large-bodied animals, or inter-species communication, with a startling degree of detail
and observational skill.

Shipman sums up:

The first and second stages of human evolution reveal a trajectory in behavior that is
marked by an intensifying focus on the behavior and ecology of animals,
accompanying a progressive broadening of the human predatory niche. When joined
by increased sophistication in tool making, the animal connection enabled some
human populations to procure more animal resources from a wider range of species
and habitatsan obvious evolutionary advantage. Knowledge of the animals without
the tools, or possession of the tools without the knowledge of the animals, was
unlikely to have been advantageous.

I agree with Shipmans basic point that tools without knowledge are unlikely to have
been terribly helpful, but I dont think that this necessarily proves humans have a
special connection with animals. After all, virtually every predator gets really good
at either going hungry or understanding on some level, even if not at all conscious,
where to find prey and how to bring it down.

But her restatement of some well-known facts, such as the predominance of animals,
not all of which were primary food sources, in cave paintings in light of her argument
about human-animal relations does demand some consideration. Was the animal-
human connection driving human evolution? Im not so sure. Is the predominance of
animals in painting interesting? Hell, yes, and Im glad shes drawing this out for
further thought.

Rather than seeing the connection as a driver of human evolution, I think we can
see it as a very intriguing product of having such a large brained, interpretively
creative animal becoming a predator. The European cave paintings, often of
animals that did not predominate in the painters diets, for example, may not have
been caused by a connection with animals, but by the challenges of passing on
information about animals in human communities or of the creative elaboration of the
relationship between predator and prey into new, ritualized, even magical or proto-
religious forms.

The absences are as interesting as the fact that animals are present. For example, the
fact that dogs and wolves do not appear more often in the paintings is intriguing,
especially if dogs were already socially interacting in rich ways with humans by the
time of the paintings. One suggestion is that dogs, like humans, were somehow
tabooed from depiction, as neither species appears with anything like the frequency
we might expect (if the depictions were simply drawn from daily life without
ideological or cultural biases).

In historical hunters and gatherers, we often find very elaborate theories and even
spiritualities around the predator-prey relationship: animals are treated with certain
forms of respect and complex rituals structure elaborate relationships that, in
empirical terms, are pretty one-sided. The hunters may be staging all sorts of rituals in
honour of their prey, but its not clear that this is because of any actual connection to
the animals other than in the perceptions of the hunters. More likely, its an
extraordinary projection that creates a rich relationship, lived experientially only
by the humans involved, but one that may contain pragmatic as well as mystical
information.

Wolf/dog-human commensality

Starting at least 15 kya, humans began to have long-term interactions with wolves that
transformed them into dogs. Shipman goes with the earliest dates provided by
archaeological evidence of the Goyet dog from Belgium, dated to 32 kya, but these
remains are still fairly controversial, in part because the intervening evidence is fairly
sparse. Moreover, genetic evidence tells a radically different story, pushing back the
possible divergence of domesticated dogs from wolves to as long ago as 135kya (Vil
et al. 1997; see also Zeder et al. 2006; for a discussion, check Anthropology.net, but
see Shipmans piece in American Scientist).

In another of her articles, Shipman offers an account of human domestication of

orphaned wolves that is consistent with the idea that animals are tools, and the
implication that humans were the active agents in the relationship, that disagrees
with the more mutual relationship described by Paxton and the Coppingers. Shipman
explained in her 2009 article in American Scientist (The Wolf at the Door):

How did this important change come about? Probably in the distant past, humans took
in a wolf cub, or even a whole litter of cubs, and provided shelter, food and
protection. As the adopted cubs matured, some were aggressive, ferocious and
difficult to handle; those probably ended up in the pot or were cast out. The ones that
were more accepting of and more agreeable to humans were kept around longer and
fed more. In time, humans might have co-opted the natural abilities of canids, using
the dogs keen noses and swift running skills, for example, to assist in hunting game.
If only the most desirable dogs were permitted to breed, the genes encoding for
better dogs would continue to be concentrated until the new domesticated species
(or subspecies) was formed.

The wide disparity in likely dates of dog domestication and the difficulty of
determining the earliest example of dog/wolf-human relations points to the
complexity of these relationships, that they are not as simple as the scenario Shipman
provides. The story she adopts is consistent with her focus on alloparenting and
animals as living tools, but not consistent with current thinking about how the
reciprocal relationship between wolves and humans produced dogs.

A number of scholars have pointed out that the first wolves living in close
proximity to humans might have been self-domesticating, either following
camps of nomadic hunter-foragers (see Paxton 2000) or living commensally near
permanent human settlements to forage on human refuse (see Coppinger and
Coppinger 2001). This pre-domestication stage is typically referred to as
commensal living, when two species benefit from living in close proximity and
avoid overt conflict. The Copingers, for example, focus on wolf scavenging in human
dump sites as a key point of contact, but the existence of dumps requires sedentary
lifestyles.

If, however, we start to think that the date of first domestication could be earlier than
around 15 kya, we run up against a problem, described by Schleidt and Shalter (2003:
65):

A word of caution, however; what do we mean by domesticated? In a most general

sense: no longer in its wild or natural state. But, were our own ancestors back then,
long before they built permanent houses for themselves, less wild than the wolves
they associated with? Is it not absurd to talk about the domestication of dogs by
humans who had not yet any permanent domiciles (domus)?

The point is not merely semantic. If the date of wolves becoming linked to human
communities is significantly prior to 15 kya, then Schleidt and Shalter are right:
wolves were adapting to humans on the move, not eating refuse from human
dumps. The humans themselves were nomadic, likely following herds of prey if
skilled in game hunting (and not clustering at coastlines, for example). In other words,
the humans were likely living a bit like wolves, albeit with a host of cultural traits and
technological capacities well beyond their canine colleagues.

Peter Bleed (2008: 8 ) points out that fully-fledged domestication required sufficient
stability of the human communities involved and dogs and humans may have
developed their connection long before humans founded permanent settlements.
From the point of view of the animal species, a domesticated form can only
survive if the ecological niche that it will occupy, that is, the human-centred
environment, is reliable. Bleed writes:

Most importantly, this new way of life gave people a new ecological standing in that,
by the end of the Pleistocene, human groups were big and regular enough to provide a
separate and reliable niche that could be occupied by other species. This niche was
not a geographic space. Rather, it rested on the cognitive and cultural capabilities of
anatomically modern folk. By 12,000 years ago, that niche was substantial and
dependable enough to become important to the evolution of other organisms.

By saying that the niche was cognitive and cultural, Bleed also can be read to
suggest that it was not the sedentary nature of the population so much as the stability
and continuity of community practices. For dogs, especially, even a traveling group of
humans might provide a sufficiently stable niche as long as their practices reliably
generated food, edible refuse and other necessary resources. A camp wolf needs a
relatively predictable band of humans to follow, not a dump to inhabit.
 The archaeological invisibility of
commensality

In either commensal scenario, the later, permanent settlement version or the earlier
camp following discussion, the human-dog/wolf connection would be especially
difficult to detect archaeologically because there might have been little or no initial
physiological change to the wolves involved and much less intimate engagement than
in the orphaned wolf pup scenario that Shipman repeats. Moreover, the earliest
relationships could have involved minimal behavioural modification, as well (as Ill
discuss), as wolves are so social that the behavioural jump to living alongside humans
might not be that great.

In addition, commensality likely occurred when there were still large numbers of non-
domesticated and non-commensal dogs, so the slow modification of a fragment of the
population might easily be masked by periodic gene flow between population
resevoirs. The semi-domesticated dogs could have interbred with their wild relatives
for long periods of time (its hard enough to keep our dogs on the property, and
theyre neutered and dont get a whiff of a wild relative in heat to encourage
wandering off at night).

Shipman doesnt dwell on the specific theoretical and archaeological problems posed
by the distinctive case of dogs, nor does she integrate alternative accounts of
commensality. This skews her account of the human-animal connection, especially
because dogs were likely the first animals domesticated and may have been engaged
in tens of thousands of years of commensal living prior to fully-fledged
domestication. To really explore the animal connection, we would have to spend a fair
bit of time and thought on this earliest and longest relationship with its distinctive
character and the species that, arguably, taught humans how to interact intimately with
animals. This chapter in human animal relations, in which dogs and only dogs were in
intimate relations with humans, was at least a few thousand years, but more likely tens
of thousands of years (and perhaps even as long as 100k years).

Ironically, the dog is an ideal animal to use as a paradigm for an animal

connection in Shipmans argument, for all kinds of behavioural and social
reasons (which well get to). Mietje Germonpre critiques Shipman a bit for the
absence of dogs in his commentary on the target article, but Germonpres focus on
animals as vessels of symbolic meanings and potential sacrifices for ritual activity,
in my opinion, is a distraction from the central issue of cooperative relations.

Dogs as tools: my disagreement with Shipman

Shipman assumes that humans saw dogs as tools, treating the first domesticated
animals much like stone choppers or wood spears, when she writes about the
earliest examples of domestication. For Shipman, animal domestication was an
extension of the logic of tools:

In essence, domestic animals are another kind of extra-somatic adaptation or tool that
expands the resources humans can exploit. Transferring the concept of tool making
and tool using from inanimate stone or wood to live animals was a fundamental
advance in human evolution predicated on knowledge of biology, ecology,
physiology, temperament, and intelligence of target species; of the selective breeding;
and of communication techniques based on the animal connection.

Although I agree that animals are valuable renewable resources, the instrumental
thrust of this account biases her article in two ways that I find difficult to reconcile.

First, because Shipman uses the idea of living tool so strongly, the metaphor
undermines the argument that the animal connection drives human evolutionary and
technological development. Rather than privileging inter-species social relations and
communication, the concept of living tool subordinates the logic of animal
domestication to the first great evolutionary development Shipman discusses: the
creation of increasingly sophisticated inanimate technology. Id like to suggest that
animals are not tools, they have wills of their own, their own inclinations,
instincts and patterns of reaction, so they demand more subtle cognitive abilities
than inanimate tools.

Second, the account Shipman offers of human ancestors using animals to pursue
human ends may exaggerate human foresight and refigure a collaborative
dynamic as a human decision. Peter Bleed (2008: 8) warns that overestimating
human awareness of what they were doing during domestication, over-emphasizing
the instrumental account, and focusing too much on human agency can misrepresent
the likely course of domestication. Bleed writes:

In spite of general understanding of the reciprocal nature of human ecological systems

and Rindos warning that early human actors could not have been conscious of the
implications of their actions, human choices and intentions tend to be given a central
role in discussions of domestication. Even analyses offered from an explicitly
evolutionary perspective present human cognitive capabilities as the factor that
brought about changes in plants and animals.

A way of moving discussion of agricultural origins beyond narrow co-evolutionary

approaches or explanations that rest on human intentionality is to ask how diverse
nonhuman species might have been drawn into a new kind of relationship with people
during the relatively brief period known as the Neolithic Revolution.
Shipmans instrumental assumption that animals are best thought of as living
tools is not questioned by the commentators in Current Anthropology, but here I
want to suggest that treating animals as living tools creates several problems with
understanding the course of domestication, especially of dogs. The irony, though, is
that I think being more sensitive to the non-instrumental relations between humans
and animals, especially dogs, actually helps Shipmans argument and enriches the
account of the animal connection by clearly distinguishing domestication from tool
use.

Part of my resistance to thinking of animals as tools arises from conversations with

my honours student, Paul. Ill let Paul report his findings (hes writing up now), but
one of the things that is clear from his ethnography is that dog handlers have to work
with their animals, how the animal cant simply be turned into a tool that expresses
the will of the human leader. Dogs, like other animals, have their own instincts,
cognitive abilities, reactions and the like handlers and dogs wind up much more
like partners than in a one-sided or dictatorial relationship. Although Pauls
research is with modern examples, I think we have to reflect on what animals can do
before we understand the tenor of early human-animal relations. (For example, some
domestic animals may be so hard to handle that they are not tools simply because of
their obdurate-ness, whereas for dogs the issue is more than limitations or
inclindations.)

Animals (huh!): What are they good for?

Roxy and Louis

Shipman outlines a wide range of things that domesticated animals are good for:

At least 10 such resources can be identified as follows: (1) muscular power beyond
human strength; (2) rapid transport of goods or people; (3) raw material (wool or hair)
for making fabric, rope, and so on; (4) useful fertilizer, fuel, and building material
(manure); (5) free disposal of refuse and ordure; (6) mobile wealth and storage for
excess grain crops (which can be retrieved via slaughter); (7) high-fat and high-
protein food (milk and milk products) for adults and weanlings, enabling a decrease in
interbirth spacing; (8) protection for people, possessions, and dwellings; (9) tracking
and killing of game or pests; and (10) combined traits that enable humans to live in
new habitats. Examples of the last resource include the advantages camels offered in
deserts, pigs and dogs in Oceania, reindeer and dogs in the Far North, yaks in the
mountain regions of Asia, and alpacas and llamas in high-altitude South America.

When we focus on the likely long period of wolf-human commensality, an absolutely

essential chapter in the biography of the animal connection, not all of these resources
were in play. Its unlikely, for example, that camp wolves or commensal dogs would
have been any good for # 1, 2, 3, 4, or 7 in much of a way. #6 might have been a
factor if humans kept commensal dogs to eventually eat them, but they would have
made a terribly inefficient calorie storage device. #10 might be in play, but its not
immediately obvious. The only things that commensal dogs would be good for in an
indisputable fashion are functions #5, and to some degree, #8 and 9.

I do agree with Shipman that learning to handle and live successfully with animals
would have been a selective advantage, but the point is that, for a very long period of
time when humans were learning how to deal with dogs, the animals wouldnt
have been terribly useful measured by this standard of ten possible resources.
Our ancestors would hardly have been able to get a camp wolf, an animal not entirely
committed to hanging out with humans, to drag a sled full of gear. So what would
dogs do for humans?

Sensing through animals: wolves, for example

Before dogs were useful for things like fetching balls and chasing fire trucks, I
suspect one of the earliest capacities that they brought to neighbouring human
communities was their perceptions. Wolves and other animals could perceive some
sensations well before our ancestors, even if hominin sensory acuity in natural
settings likely would have made their descendants seem positively disconnected from
their environments (as I discussed in the post, Your Brain on Nature: Outdoors and
Out of Reach 2). Wolves, for example, have especially acute hearing and night-time
vision, both of which would be useful to humans.

The timescales of both models for a commensal transition to dog domestication

suggest that their wolf ancestors may have first dwelled close by human
encampments, living on waste and scavenging from humans. The wild dogs most
likely to endure in this camp follower or garbage picker niche had to overcome both
fear of humans excessive flight response, on the one hand, and too much aggression,
on the other, or risk being driven off or injuring the source of scavengeable resources.

Whether dog ancestors were de facto members of human groups or just lurking
nearby, humans would have come to realize that the animals sensed things that the
humans could not. Sounds and smells that didnt raise an alarm in humans might
cause dogs to start growling or to perk up to pay attention, especially at night. The
process would hardly have been all that unusual to accomplished hunters and savvy
observers of animals (like those who produced the cave paintings in Southern
Europe). The realization would have likely built upon earlier awareness that animals
reacted to each other, for example, when hunting, if prey startled.

Anyone familiar with animals in the wild learns to read bird movements, changes in
the background noise of a forest and the like in order to anticipate threats or even
simply perceive things that are beyond the range of direct sensation. For example,
finding sources of water can be made easier by observing animals movements, the
sounds of frogs, tracks, and a host of other cues.

Since dogs, like other social animals, signal amongst themselves when they feel
threatened or sense something intriguing, humans surely learned to cue on this
behaviour, likely before dogs were domesticated to any degree. Growling, hair
standing on end, and stirring more generally among dogs, especially if the dogs were
not pointed at the humans, would have been a good sign that something was amiss.

In this sense, dogs could become a kind of sensory prosthesis for humans, providing
cues from sensations that were below the threshold of direct human perception. Im
reminded of this many nights when our dogs detect movement that I cannot perceive
or when my wife asks one of them, Whats wrong? when they behave oddly.

But the crucial dimension of this sensory commensality for the purposes of Shipmans
discussion of the animal connection is that this early realization that other animals
sense, and the possibility of long-term dependence upon dogs or other animals as
sensory prostheses, would involve a recognition on some level that animals know
things we do not. The humans would have to develop, in addition to an intra-
species Theory of (Human) Mind, an inter-species Theory of (Animal) Mind,
offering another important way that increasing intelligence might prove to be of
adaptive advantage (see Flinn et al. 2005).

One of the key differences between dogs and wolves is that dogs can learn to pay
attention to both their human interlocutors and to the things to which we pay
attention. They cue off of our attention. For example, Miklosi et al. (2003) found that
dogs are better social communicators with humans, looking to their handlers when
running into an insoluble problem for cues like pointing, and hypothesize that dogs
might even be better able to read human faces than either wolves or other intelligent
animals, like chimpanzees.

But the same hyper-social skill of looking to inter-species communication to

understand the world is also a characteristic of humans, seen most clearly in the
exaggerated case of guide (or seeing eye), tracking, and sniffer dogs. The fact that
humans, not just dogs, can cue off the perceptions and non-verbal
communication of other animals suggests that the animal connection is a
manifestation of social intelligence, and thus part of a suite of advantages arising
from increased encephalization (the reason I refer to Flinn et al. 2005). Sensory
cuing, loosely under #8 of Shipmans list of domesticated animal functions, might
have been the first use dogs could have served to human communities, even before
inter-species contact was intimate to any degree.

The reason I think sensory commensality would have been the first use of dogs is
that it requires virtually no modification of wolf behaviour, except for proximity
to humans. In addition, the human cognitive abilities required, the Theory of
(Animal) Mind, is not a great leap for our ancestors either. Both human and dog
adaptations are very much in line with the species hyper-sociality, and this sort of
Theory of Mind activity and gregarious sociality with other species are not something
found in a lot of other species. Even wild chimpanzees have trouble with things like
pointing, which humans and dogs both figure out.

Wolf distribution (Wikimedia Commons, see below)

Fellow hunters

If we really want to think about how wolves might be useful to humans, one question
to ask is what are wolves really good at doing: turns out, thats hunting. Wolves
are terribly young evolutionarily, not much older than humans; the available evidence
suggests that a recognizably modern wolf may have only arisen less than 3 mya.

Prior to their partnering with humans, wolves were already enormously successful,
behaviorally-flexible social canids, ranging across virtually the entire terrestrial
Northern Hemisphere. They were the most wide-spread, large-bodied mammal, the
top of the food chain, unless they came up against tigers or our ancestors. Ironically,
once domesticated, Lupus became even more successful, tagging along with human
colonization to every habitable continent.

Arguably, human ancestors displaced Lupus from its position atop the food pyramid,
occupying a very similar niche of fast-moving, pack-hunting predator, well equipped
to claiming ungulate game that moved in herds. Schleidt and Shalter (2003: 63)
point out that human-dog collaboration brought together the two most social and
successful hunters, remarkably similar in many ways once humans developed the
necessary technology and skills.

Many later domesticates were complementary species, eating foods that humans
could not digest and transforming them into animal protein (which we could).
Dogs were different; dogs could be partners in doing something that our ancestors
were increasingly good at doing themselves.

I take this analysis, in part, from Schleidt and Shalter (2003), who point out that both
Homo sapiens and Canus lupus were extremely socially adept, pack hunting
ominvores, as adept as other large carnivores at taking prey but less specialized or
finicky about what they ate. Schleidt and Shalter (ibid.: 62) highlight how the social
qualities of wolves, especially their cooperative inclinations and relatively nonviolent
forms of intra-group organization, allow them to form mixed, multi-species packs:
humans, dogs, cats, goats, sheep, horses living in harmony. One coming out of
Africa, the other out of the Americas, these two mammals met up in the same niche
with corresponding strengths in behaviour, and instead of fighting for competitive
exclusion, ended up working together.
Im not wholly convinced by the arguments that Schleidt and Shalter advance, but the
idea that commensal wolves could hunt with humans seems to me to be more
plausible than other initial uses from the list of ten potential resources. Wolves were
already hunting in groups, using ambush and endurance-based techniques that might
have been quite similar to contemporary humans, although humans likely brought
some distinctive technological advances to the equation (such as projectile weapons).

Domestication from the dogs perspective

Dogs are so unusual among domesticated animals, such an outlier, that the dog
may be an instructive special case of domestication, also instructive to our
ancestors in that the dog may have taught humans how to deal with animals. As
Richard Klein suggests in his commentary on the Shipman article:

Only the special relationship between people and dogs may be significantly older
[than 12k years], and almost everything about it, including its near ubiquity and its
level of intimacy, suggests that it might be understood not so much from the human
side but more from the dogs as the human connection.

That is, if dogs are so unusual, maybe their domestication shows us more about the
dogs potential than about humans distinctive connections to animals. If dogs were
self-domesticating, maybe they showed us how to do it, driving the rise of greater
human intelligence about animals that would eventually lead our ancestors on to more
challenging inter-species arrangements.

For example, Schleidt and Shalter (2003: 57), argue that the ability to be domesticated
is not merely a matter of intelligence, nor is it of animals being like us or having our
capacities. Schleidt and Shalter ask:

Isnt it strange that, our being such an intelligent primate, we didnt domesticate
chimpanzees as companions instead? Why did we choose wolves even though they
are strong enough to maim or kill us?

Chimpanzees turn out to be really hard to socialize; dogs, not so difficult. For Schleidt
and Shalter, the case of dogs suggests that we need to understand how dogs are
shaping us as well as how we are shaping their selection, a tool that shapes its user
(a process that I argued is under-explored when treating culture as extra-somatic
adaptation; I would suggest tools also become part of our species developmental
niche and selective pressures).
Rather than seeing the dog as a tool, Peter Bleed says that we also need to
understand the animals as active partners in the relationship and humans as active, but
often unconscious selectors. Bleed (2008: 9) nicely compares the idea that humans
directed domestication comparable to saying that petri dishes developed
penicillin. Instead, he advocates recognizing the active role of the human partners
and domesticates: There is theoretical and academic utility in looking at
domesticates not as passive resources or even as co-evolving species, but as
influential occupants of a dynamic set of opportunities afforded by people. For the
camp wolves, humans were a potential niche to occupy, one that they adapted to so
well that they wound up piggy-backing on human global dispersal.

Our non-human social life

To wrap up, I want to reflect on the implications of considering dogs as first animal
domesticates and not as tools. Shipmans ideas are intriguing, and I think that, if we
recognize the distinctive way that our ancestors likely interacted with dogs, we see
that animal domestication, in part, was not an extension of the logic of tools, but
a growing sophistication on the part of humans social capacities. Shipman writes:

Clearly, humans who handled and lived with animals more successfully accrued a
selective advantage in performing tasks that humans without animals could not
achieve. Domestication was reciprocal, as the animals in turn selected for behavioral
or physical traits in humans, such as better communication with animals and the
continued functioning of lactase into adulthood.

I also agree strongly that domestication was reciprocal, the presence of animals
shaping humans just as humans shaped domesticated animals, but again, I think her
own description undermines a too-simple reading of the animals as tools.

One of the most well developed argument for the function of increasing intelligence
in humans is that our ancestors needed a lot of cognitive wattage to deal with complex
social interactions among their fellow hominids (see, for example, Flinn et al. 2005).
In a world of alliances, in-group sexual competition, cooperative hunting, demanding
childcare situations, extended kin-based solidarity and long-standing inter-group
rivalry, a human needed a fair bit of gray (and white) matter to sort out all the players.

The social intelligence hypothesis, sometimes referred to as the Machiavellian

intelligence hypothesis after a concept introduced by primatologist Frans de Waal,
suggests that a wide range of human cognitive abilities might serve well in a swirling
social world, helping us to accomplish such tasks as perceiving each others
motivations, ascertaining the limits of each others knowledge, remembering allies
and enemies, and recognizing deception.

But increased intelligence also would have allowed humans to sort out animals
behaviours and cognitive capacities, realizing which animals were really
dangerous, which could be frightened off, and how different prey behaved when
confronted. All sorts of activities, from ambush hunting to choosing a good safe
place to sleep for the night would have been made more effective with increased
intelligence as our ancestors started to perceive more, not just of other humans
motivations and perceptions, but also the capacities of non-humans.
In this sense, I strongly agree with Pat Shipman:

Domestication, she explained, is a process that takes generations and puts selective
pressure on abilities to observe, empathize, and communicate across species barriers.
Once accomplished, the domestication of animals offers numerous advantages to
those with these attributes. The animal connection is an ancient and fundamentally
human characteristic that has brought our lineage huge benefits over time, Shipman
said. Our connection with animals has been intimately involved with the evolution of
two key human attributes tool making and language and with constructing the
powerful ecological niche now held by modern humans. (from the Penn State press
release)

Again, she may be over-reaching, but shes spot on when saying that, once animals
become part of our intimate niche, they start to be part of the selective forces acting
upon us, whether thats as disease resistance to zoonoses (illnesses originating in
animals, such as measles in dogs, mumps in poultry, tuberculosis in cattle, and the
common cold in horses, as Sandra Olsen lists in her commentary) or social attributes
that might make a person more likely to succeed in a human niche that includes other
animals.

For example, a genetic abnormality that makes a person smell tasty like a leg of lamb
might be increasingly maladaptive if youre camping out with only-recently-
domesticated wolves. Or, more seriously, being able to communicate with dogs, using
ones own emotions or activities in ways that dogs find predictable and directive,
could help a hunter accompanied by camp wolves or a human band member looking
to canines for protection.

Conclusion: From Machiavellian to Doolittlean intelligence

In this context, the dog represents a really interesting social problem: dogs can be
pretty damn unpredictable, and the same species that can become your best friend
(in a proverbial sense) is also a pretty fierce adversary. Unlike other animals that can
be pretty reliably classed into predator, prey, or irrelevant, dogs, especially in that
communal period, would likely be capable of nearly anything from a hominid point of
view.

You wouldnt just need Machiavellian intelligence, youd also need Doolittlean
intelligence (after Dr. Doolittle, that is): sharpened abilities to perceive the
emotions of a non-human, to recognize animal behaviour patterns, and to
develop ways to affect those behaviour patterns. These animal connection-related
skills would be on top of other animal liked cognitive skills, such as those needed to
stalk prey and avoid predators. Domestication would have substantially increased the
cognitive challenges of dealing with animals by welcoming a whole new, more
complicated class of actors into long-term intimate contact with human groups.

What Im suggesting is not quite as strong as what Shipman posits that the animal-
human connection drove human evolution but rather that the possibility of an
animal-human connection demonstrates that the humans involved arent just capable
of Theory of (Human) Mind perception. Theyre obviously figuring out a Theory of
(Dog) Mind as well, and perhaps a whole range of other feats of subjectivity
shifting that allows them to walk in the paws, if you will, of other species.

In addition, if humans are able to develop a Theory of (Animal) Mind that is not
simply anthropomorphizing, this would suggest that, at least in these circumstances,
Theory of Mind was not only a projection of ones own awareness, but might also be
something more malleable or imaginative. One can see this very clearly in Rane
Willerslevs (2004) remarkable ethnographic research with Siberian hunters.

Im not entirely convinced of this last point. Most evidence suggests that humans
close to dogs tend to anthropomorphize; surveys in the US, for example, reliably
assert that their animals have human-like personalities at rates of around 90% or
higher. Although anthropomorphizing animals, assuming that they have human
emotions, can be a profound error in understanding our non-human neighbours, the
tendency to perceive animals as having human-like emotions or motivations or
personalities suggests a supple flexibility in that social mind that extends beyond just
human life.

This runs against some ideas about how humans accomplish such feats as perceiving
others intentions, for example, by projecting ourselves into the position of the other
actor or by simulating their emotional reactions in our own emotional parts of the
nervous system (for example, through mirror neurons). Instead, our ancestors would
have to learn to perceive a range of non-human actors as having their own social
signaling and non-verbal communication. These ancestors couldnt get to that
space simply by anthropomorphizing because the animals dont have identical
forms of expression (although there are interesting relations).

Shipmans account of human-animal relations as part of human evolution, although I

disagree on some of the finer points, is a really persuasive and intriguing way to
rethink human cognitive development. Her article (and the forthcoming book)
reminds us to include animals, not simply as predators and prey, in our thinking about
the niche in which our ancestors developed. But treating this relationship as an
extension of tool use likely overstates our ancestors foresight about the usefulness of
partially-domesticated wolves and underestimates the degree to which humans and
animals were in reciprocal relationships.

But Im grateful to Shipman, not merely for the thought provoking article, but also for
a great opportunity to post pictures of my dogs! So heres the crew at our farm:
For more on dogs and evolution:

The press release about Shipmans work on Penn States website: New Hypothesis for
Human Evolution and Human Nature.

An earlier article by Pat Shipman on The Wolf at the Door (American Scientist)
which discusses both the evidence of early dog domestication and the issue of how
difficult it is to pin down specifically domestic variation in Lupus.
Commentary by John Hawks on The Aurignacian dogs.

For a dissenting view, you could start at Bruce Bowers piece, Oldest dog debated, at
Science News.

Evolution: The Curious Case of Dogs at Observations of a Nerd (great post, especially
the discussion of Moscow feral dogs adapting to become great beggars on the citys
metros).

L. Cases 2008 article from the Journal of Animal Sciences, ASAS CENTENNIAL
PAPER: Perspectives on domestication: The history of our relationship with mans
best friend. (86:3245-3251. doi:10.2527/jas.2008-1147)

See also Rodney L Honeycutts recent (2010) article, Unraveling the mysteries of
dog evolution, from BMC Biology (8/20, doi: 10.1186/1741-7007-8-20), available as
an open source read at PubMed Central.

Science writer Carl Zimmer offers an account of dog intelligence, the opening of the
Duke Canine Cognition Centre, and Henry the schnoodle figuring out what pointing
means at Time Magazine: The Secrets Inside Your Dogs Mind.

Retrieverman compiles a number of sources of accounts of camp wolves living with

Native American, Aboriginal, and other at least partially foraging peoples in his post,
Camp Wolves.

Images:

Ridiculously cute photos of Louis, Roxy and Spud (a friends Groodle puppy), by the
author.
Map of wolf distribution from Wikimedia Commons.
Created by Tommyknocker.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wolf_distr.gif

Cartoon. Not sure anymore. (If anyone knows, Im happy to put a credit on this.)

Stumble It!

References:

Bleed, Peter. (2006). Living in the human niche Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues,
News, and Reviews, 15 (1), 8-10 DOI: 10.1002/evan.20084

Clutton-Brock, J. 1999. A natural history of domesticated mammals. 2nd edition.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Coppinger, Raymond, and Lorna Coppinger. 2001. Dogs: A new understanding of

canine origin, behavior, and evolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

FLINN, M., GEARY, D., & WARD, C. (2005). Ecological dominance, social
competition, and coalitionary arms racesWhy humans evolved extraordinary
intelligence Evolution and Human Behavior, 26 (1), 10-46 DOI:
10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2004.08.005

Miklosi A, Kubinyi E, Topl J, Gcsi M, Virnyi Z, & Csnyi V (2003). A simple

reason for a big difference: wolves do not look back at humans, but dogs do. Current
biology : CB, 13 (9), 763-6 PMID: 12725735

Paxton, D. (2000). A Case for a Naturalistic Perspective Anthrozoos: A

Multidisciplinary Journal of The Interactions of People & Animals, 13 (1), 5-8 DOI:
10.2752/089279300786999996

Schleidt, Wolfgang M., & Shalter, Michael D. (2003). Co-evolution of Humans and
Canids: An Alternative View of Dog Domestication: Homo Homini Lupus? Evolution
and Cognition, 9 (1), 57-72

Shipman, Pat. (2010). The Animal Connection and Human Evolution Current
Anthropology, 51 (4), 519-538 DOI: 10.1086/653816

Vila, C. et al. (1997). Multiple and Ancient Origins of the Domestic Dog Science, 276
(5319), 1687-1689 DOI: 10.1126/science.276.5319.1687

Willerslev, R. (2004). NOT ANIMAL, NOT NOT-ANIMAL: HUNTING,

IMITATION AND EMPATHETIC KNOWLEDGE AMONG THE SIBERIAN
YUKAGHIRS Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 10 (3), 629-652 DOI:
10.1111/j.1467-9655.2004.00205.x

Zeder, Melinda A., Eve Emshwiller, Bruce D. Smith and Daniel G. Bradley. 2006.
Documenting domestication: the inter-section of genetics and archaeology. Trends in
Genetics 22(3): 139-155. doi:10.1016/j.tig.2006.01.007
Zeuner, Friedrich Eberhard. 1963. A History of Domesticated Animals. Harper &
Row: New York, Evanston.

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27 thoughts on The dog-human connection

in evolution

1. dlende says:

August 23, 2010 at 2:37 pm

 Awesome post, Greg. Louis is way too cute!!!!

Reply

2. nathan says:

August 23, 2010 at 4:13 pm

have you read when species meet by donna haraway? its excellent and offers
an extended discussion of the dog-human relationship.

Reply

3. Barry Elledge says:

August 24, 2010 at 6:57 am

I remember a talk in 1971 by the anthropologist Edmund Carpenter, who had

overwintered decades earlier with an Inuit family group in an igloo. He
recounted the death of an Inuit woman when she slipped and fell on the ice.
Their dogs immediately attacked and ripped out her throat, since her reclining
posture indicated she was no long dominant. I was surprised that the Inuit
didnt train or domesticate their dogs better; Carpenter replied that Inuit dogs
remained relatively wild because wolves frequently mated with them.

I would suspect that a similar interbreeding problem must have plagued early
nomadic hunters everywhere within wolf territory. Until people built
settlements with walls, keeping dogs and wolves separate would have been
difficult. Perhaps selective breeding progressed more rapidly if early humans
brought dogs from the Near East south out of the range of wolves, possibly
into someplace like North Africa or Arabia. Ancient Egypt certainly had
hunting hounds with unwolflike features from early times. Whether Egyptian
breeds antedate other physically distinct dog breeds, I have no idea, but Id
like to know.

Reply

o gregdowney says:

August 24, 2010 at 7:04 am

Yikes! Glad that my dogs dont do this when I sleep on the grass.
No, Barry, I totally agree, especially with your contention in the second
paragraph. The domestication and transition to sedentary life by
humans likely created the first opportunities to really keep apart
populations of human-proximate proto-dogs from their wolf cousins.
Prior to that, its hard to imagine how a traveling band could have
possibly kept the gene pools from constantly remixing. This is one
reason that Im not overly convinced that the separation date of dog
genetic material is a good measure of the beginning of human-dog
relations.

Greg

Reply

Jane says:

December 26, 2015 at 5:54 am

Hi Greg,
I am surprised to see an anthropological look at dogs adopt
wholesale sets of assumptions rather than question them. Dogs
are no more descended from wolves than wolves are from dogs.
They are, as you say, cousins, and as is the way with cousins
they share a common ancestor. What is significant about this is
dogs are not hunters but rather, scavengers and they were
naturally selected into domestication, rather than actively
captured into it. You only need to see the failure of wolves to be
domesticated to see how man did not/could not domesticate
wild dogs.

It was natural selection that ensured wolves didnt interbreed

with dogs as they were shy of humans and do not go near
human habitation given the choice. Dogs on the other hand,
through natural selection, were able to utilise the new resource
of human waste dumps (whether nomadic or sedentary) by not
being scared of humans unlike most wild animals. That is only
dogs that had less to no fear of humans could capitalise on
access to human waste and only those that had no aggression
towards humans could do so. Aggressive dogs would have been
killed/chased off by humans.

The story about Inuit being killed by their dogs isnt so much a
case of bad breesing but poor socialisation of the dogs, as we
see in sedentary suburban cities of Australia, the US, UK,
South Africa, NewZealand, Canada etc.

The idea that dogs are some how into or about dominance is a
myth started by the Nazi party and to see dogs killng a human
 as an act of dominance is a significant misconception.
Mistreated dogs bite/attack their owners when they see no other
way out of a cycle of torment which, despite what we might
wish to think about indigenous practices with working dogs,
is readily apparent in the training and maintaining of sled dogs
globally. Human socialisation with these sorts of dogs is not a
central tennet In their rearing and their breeding has lng left the
natural selection process that saw dogs become domesticated
that had as an important dimension to it lack of fear and
aggression towards hmans. Not dissmilar to tje practices of
breeding for aggression in certain breeds in recent history. By
way of the dogs being kept separate from the humans they
coexist with and breeding being primarily about working as a
sled dog, temperament isnt an important consideration. Fallng
over in range of tje dgs amouns to a careless and dangerous
thing to let hapoen, basically as they are not safe dogs.

So I argue that the descended from wolf model is an

orientalism only about and towards dogs and this extends to
how we look at dogs as pack animals that are organised
according to hierarchies of dominance, although the latter is a
Nazi flourish and anyone who subscribes to it should be treated
circumspectly.

I thnk you would find Tm Ingolds work on animals quite

interestung and definitely a more nuanced, reflexive and
considered anthropological approachnto the study of animals
http://www.wcaanet.org/downloads/dejalu/feb_2015/ingold.pdf

Cheers,
Kane

4. monado says:

August 24, 2010 at 7:45 am

Its odd that Shipman wouldnt include the taming of fire as one of the keys to
human evolution, especially since H. erectus had fire and eating cooked meat
enabled us to evolve smaller teeth and chewing muscles.

I suggest that the human tendency to adopt animals into the family might have
something to do with our evolved need for society and to give extended
parental care. Both those needs could easily be extended to animals, in the
same way that a solitary pigeon will display for a photo of a pigeon or even, in
desperation, a smudge on the floor. Ive seen other social animals playing with
other species. Magpies stealing flowers from each other will take time out to
drop them on a squirrel.
 Interesting that no one seems to have domesticated the pig! It may have
simply adopted us as equals and companions.

Reply

5. monado says:

August 24, 2010 at 7:52 am

Re Inuit story: and people yearn for the Good Old Days!

I think that dogs started out doing what they do naturally, helping to hunt or
give warning, and only later were bred and trained into something more like a
living tool, e.g. the sheep dog, an anti-wolf wolf as my covivant once said.

Reply

6. German Dziebel says:

August 25, 2010 at 12:39 am

Very cool, post. Thanks. I was wondering if our recent (200 year-old) learned
fascination and identification with great apes is just a pretext to domesticate
them for higher order informational tasks that dogs or horses are not capable
of delivering. I suppose when we first domesticated the dog, we also framed
our interest in this new tool in terms of our (totemic) kinship with them
(animal connection or, compare, Darwins hidden bond of connection=
descent) as evidenced by the ethnographically recorded clan names such as
Wolf Clan, etc.

Reply

7. Paul Keil says:

August 25, 2010 at 6:53 am

Great piece Greg & thanks for the shout-out!:)

Sensory commensality is a neat idea, and I really like the notion of having to
appeal to a theory of (animal) mind in order to understand how a dogs
sensory capacity is exploited. You put forward the example of reading the
dogs bark as having a intentional meaning (indeed, my dad has access to the
world outside his living room, and whether it is a stranger, my mother or his
mother-in-law approaching the house, via the tone of his dogs bark) and Id
 like to further add to that idea and consider modern day tracking dogs as an
example by which we may further consider how humans adapted themselves
socially and cognitively to proto-dogs in order to exploit their sensory
capacities.

I find tracking dog relationships really strange, since the handler is dependent
on an other-worldly umwelt which is largely inaccessible to them, and at times
in confrontation with their own worldly judgments. Vicki Hearne (1986)in her
book Adams Task talks about her knowledge coming to an end in regards
to teaming up with her tracking dog, and that she needs to let go and put trust
into her dog: while Im handling Belle I no longer believe my eyes in the way
I normally do (p. 98). I find the idea of this kind of trust quite extraordinary,
considering we could imagine the handler as flying blind somewhat, and that
in certain circumstances it is still probably best to trust the dogs performance
even if it may go against our visual judgments (arguably our primary means
of knowledge construction and environmental interpretation).

I guess in some ways we put alot of trust into the reliability of our
technological devices, such our GPS systems, but there is something alot more
complicated going on with dogs, since we perceive dogs as being open to
errors of judgement, distraction, and symptoms of fatigue that only organisms
can have. Trust in this sense is pretty high up for me on the depth of social
interaction scale. (Haraway would probably say that these acts give animals a
certain authority within these relationships.)

Further social trust, unlike trusting a GPS, is not a passive cognitive process,
rather handlers are: (1)reading the dog closely, observing the honesty of the
dogs intentions (e.g., the intensity of the dogs focus); and (2) more
interestingly, also learning to sense differently and become more responsive
to certain environmental elements in particular, the wind, and what direction
it is blowing at ground level in order to read and understand their dogs
performance better. The handler has no better idea of what the dog
phenomenologically perceives, but they are learning to orient themselves to
the world in ways that dogs do, in order to understand them better.

Tracking dogs, I think are a great example in understanding how humans must
socially/cognitively adapt and shape themselves according to the animal they
are in relationship with. Perhaps the concept of trust and social assessment
are an important consideration in understanding how inter-species
relationships are formed, in particular the instrumental ones spoken about by
Shipman.

Paul

Paul

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9. doug l says:

August 29, 2010 at 3:37 am

Interesting stuff.
Once we had dogs we no longer were obligate marathon runners so-much
since the dogs would help us in keeping a permanent place in the wild hunting
grounds well provisioned, much safer (watchdog and ferocious defender of its
pack) and, though I hesitate to mention it, hygenic by eating carrion and..uh,
stuffok, poop. I said it. Its true. They eat itand then lick us. I still love the
little monsters.

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15. Mark Siegeltuch says:

April 16, 2013 at 2:59 pm

I was a good friend of Dr. Carpenter and he once told me that dogs may have
domesticated themselves, being camp followers. In Cliche to Archtype,
Marshall McLuhan, a good friend of Carpenters, provides a long list of words
and expressions that derived from hunting with dogs (down at the heels, for
example). His point was that animals, like technologies (the telescope for
example), can extend the range of human sense life. These extensions become
unconscious and reflect themselves in language.

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16. Pat Hennesey says:

April 16, 2013 at 4:54 pm

Just saw this. Re Inuit dogs, the Samoyede or Nenet people of Siberia had a
reindeer herding dog that was very socially oriented. We know these dogs as
 the Samoyed, very cute, very people-oriented, ended up in the tents of polar
explorers. No eating their people.
Re interactions, agility dogs work very closely with their people they are
often called Velcro dogs because of the close bonds.

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17. Mark Siegeltuch says:

May 28, 2013 at 8:00 pm

Eskimo dogs were largely feral and often quite dangerous. They slept outside
the igloo and mated with wolves. Eskimos carried whips to keep their dogs at
bay but their wildness was an asset in that environment. They werent pets.
Even domesticated dogs attack their owners on occasion if they bend over. Its
a signal that youre fair game. I was once stalked by a fox because I was lying
down. When I got up, it moved off. When I lay down, it went back into
stalking mode. A little unsettling on a dark night in Wales.The anthropologist
Edmund Carpenter told me that he knew a missionary who brought ice skates
to the arctic to show the Eskimos. To skate, you must bend forward, and he
had every dog in the village chasing him.

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23. satanicpuritan says:

October 13, 2015 at 7:50 pm

Reblogged this on The Satanic Puritan and commented:

Some interesting thoughts on the Animal Connection.

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24. Patrick O'Connor says:

January 26, 2016 at 11:49 am

First, I think the cartoon you included was by Larry Gonick. I havent seen it
before, but its his style, in many ways. Look at The Cartoon History of the
Universe or others of his works, and youll see what I mean.
Second, we come to the question: Did humans teach dogs to understand
pointing, or vice-versa? Other primates dont denote something of interest by
pointing, but humans and dogs do. Weve co-evolved long enough to have a
subset of dogs that are called pointers, but this must be an action native to the
common ancestor of humans and dogs. Lacking quadrupedality and a tail,
humans had to choose a different appendage for pointing, but its clearly
cognate to what dogs do, or we wouldnt have assigned the name pointer to
dogs with that behavior.
Third, dog-human partnership might be a form of technological evolution. Co-
evolving with another species is unconscious technology. We just dont
recognize it as such, but adaptation of fire and collaboration with wolf/dog
canids are both technologies, or using the phrase common today, are re-
purposing something in a utilitarian way that might have been stumbled upon
by accident in the first place..