The Intimate Bond (7 page)

Thousands of hunters and foragers adjusted to these environmental changes in various ways. Some hunting bands moved northward from sheltered valleys in southwestern France and northern Spain and into the more open terrain of areas such as the Paris Basin and northern Germany, where they continued to hunt reindeer and other Ice Age animals, as they had always done.
⁴
Others moved to newly exposed coasts and to lakes formed by the retreating ice and became fisher folk and fowlers. Many groups stayed where they were and adapted to lives where wild plant food became as important as game. The prey they hunted was no longer reindeer and other cold-loving animals, but red deer and other forest beasts, taken by patient stalking and with bow and arrow. In a changing world where solitary prey, birds on the wing, and waterfowl assumed great importance, the dog came into its own and became far more than a companion—this at a time when no one cultivated the soil or herded animals. For the first time, it served as a true hunting partner in ways that overcame the limitations and size of the human hunter.

In an era of smaller, more elusive game, the dog's matchless sense of smell and silent tracking abilities paid rich dividends when the hunter was pursuing forest deer or small rodents. A well-trained hunting dog could flush waterfowl and recover shot prey from lakes and rivers. Today, there are numerous breeds of “hunting dogs” (among them hounds, retrievers, and terriers) or gun dogs. Some dogs track game by their scent. “Sight hounds” are breeds, such as whippets, that have acute sight and can run fast. They course prey from a distance, pursue, and kill it. Spaniels are adept at flushing out game for a hunter, while terriers are skilled at locating dens and capturing bolting inhabitants. Retrievers are excellent swimmers, which makes them ideal for retrieving waterfowl as well as birds on land. All these breeds, and many others, result from selective breeding by their owners.

There were, of course, none of these breeds twelve to fifteen thousand years ago, but constant association with hunters and patient training, almost certainly using rewards, would have adapted dogs into a useful tool for the hunt. The key word may be
companion
, for it seems unlikely that dogs did much of the killing. A hunter would have known his dog intimately and as well as, if not better than, his quarry. He would have recognized the telltale signs when the dog sensed a deer or some other hidden quarry, even a bear. However, in a world where more and more food came from birds of all kinds, especially waterfowl, dogs would have been invaluable for retrieving kills made among dense thickets or on the water. The hunters must have trained their dogs to remain under control, to wait quietly when sent to retrieve. Animals with “soft mouths,” who were willing to please and obey, would have been ideal for retrieving game unharmed, without consuming it at once. Sometimes they would have watched the bird fall. At others, they would have listened for directions from the hunter, who would have stayed on shore as the dog swam into deeper water. The reward back at camp would have been, perhaps, a bird or parts of the quarry.

All this is a hypothetical projection back over many thousands of years, but it gains traction when one considers the hunting weapons of the day. The Cro-Magnons and other Late Ice Age hunters used antler and bone-tipped spears, but their descendants adopted much lighter
hunting weaponry that reflected both more forested landscapes and also the need to hunt birds and other small game over land and water. They developed lethal arrows tipped with small, razor-sharp stone arrowheads known to archaeologists as microliths (from the Greek
micros
, for “small”;
lithos
, for “stone”). Thousands of microliths have come from European hunting sites dating to between 10,000 and 6000
BCE
. At a long-used hunting camp on the edge of a glacial lake at Star Carr in northeastern England dating to about 8500
BCE
, the inhabitants hunted a wide variety of mammals, including red and roe deer, as well as waterfowl, including ducks. From this settlement has come a dog skull whose carbon isotope readings reveal a diet that may have included waterfowl, fish, mollusks, plant foods, and deer meat.
⁵
At Vedbaek, across the North Sea in Denmark, a well-known hunting site of 5300 to 4500
BCE
, the inhabitants were highly efficient hunters who relied on a very broad array of game and plant foods, and on fish. Here again, microliths were commonplace. Two dog skulls come from the site, one found in a grave.

Over many centuries, dogs became companions and hunting partners in a world of wetlands and forests. They were also guards, and some may even have carried or pulled loads, a common role for them in ancient North America, but there are no signs of this occurring as early as, say, ten thousand years ago. One should also note that dogs were sometimes themselves eaten. There are many instances from Danish hunting camps and other locations of dog bones being cracked open for marrow and skulls exhibiting chopping marks.

The Ritual Dog

Quite apart from companionship or partnership in the hunt, or even faithful service as a pack dog, dogs clearly had spiritual associations in many ancient societies—if burials are any guide. Such connections cannot be discerned in the mirror of the intangible after thousands of years, but we know that dogs had powerful mythic associations in Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt, and among the Romans and in Greek society. Hindus consider dogs as the guardians of Heaven and Hell.
The Dominican order of monks has adopted a black-and-white dog as its symbol—in Latin,
domini canes
, “dogs and hounds of the Lord.” The Norse believed that a bloodstained watchdog named Garmr guarded the gates of Hell.

As we have seen, dog burials began at least fourteen thousand years ago. The Bonn-Oberkassel dog lay in a double grave. At Ain Mallaha, in Israel, an immature dog or possibly a wolf puppy lay in an eleven-thousand-year-old grave of an older person, whose hand rested on the chest of the small beast.
⁶
Another Israeli site, at Hayonim Terrace, yielded two dogs buried with people between 9000 and 8500
BCE
. Dog interments became positively commonplace in later times. At Skateholm, in Sweden, fourteen dogs lay interred in a cemetery, four of them lying with people; one, with a deliberately broken neck, placed atop the legs of a woman. Some dog burials lay with grave goods and were scattered with red ocher.

Dogs arrived in the Americas with the first human settlers, some of the few domesticated animals available to the Native Americans. Their genetic diversity confirms that they didn't originate there, but they acquired powerful ritual associations, reflected, once again, in deliberate burial. Examples abound, among them three dog burials dating to about 6500
BCE
from a long-occupied hunter-gatherer site at Koster, on the Illinois River in the Midwest, each deposited in a shallow pit apparently without much ceremony. The densest concentration of dog burials comes from archaeological sites in the Green River Valley of Kentucky, where at least 111 interments have come from 11 shell mounds, 28 of them with humans. There are also major concentrations in the central Tennessee River Valley in Alabama.

We know of canine ritual roles from carefully preserved oral traditions collected by anthropologists and others. The best known are those of the Cherokee of the southeastern United States, sometimes known as the Dog Tribe. The Cherokee's sacred dog restored order and harmony in the face of chaos. It rebalanced humans with the forces of their world. The same animal created a path to the spirit world, acted as a judge of ethical behavior, and ensured that rituals were carried out properly. Above all, dogs protected humanity and guided it on its way
to the Underworld, which gave dogs a profound association with death and the West, the realm of the dead and the night sky.

The notion of restoring order and balance may well have been the reason for ancient dog burials in many societies. Sacrificing a dog to act as judge and to guide a deceased individual who had committed some form of ritual transgression might have restored spiritual balance to a community. To place a dog at the head or at the face of the deceased, where the soul left the body, would symbolize how dogs acted as ritual leaders. The Cherokee sometimes buried dogs with deceased shamans, perhaps to guide these especially powerful souls away from the realms of the living.

We've lived in close association with dogs for some fifteen thousand years, a relationship that began among hunters facing the challenges of a rapidly warming world. From the beginning, the close ties between dogs and people may well have forged even closer spiritual associations that were to endure in changing forms for thousands of years. Dogs and humans became partners in daily life long before widespread droughts and a variety of other compelling factors turned hunting bands in southwestern Asia, and soon afterward elsewhere, into farmers and herders about twelve thousand years ago. And it was then that the relationship between people and animals changed history dramatically as new domesticated animals assumed dominant roles in human lives.

The Farming Revolution

 

CHAPTER 4

Down on the First Farms

Hallan Çemi, eastern Turkey, c. 10,000
BCE
. The village has remained at the same location for many generations. Circular huts squat around an open space, crowded in by hillsides covered with oak forest. Beyond the settlement, the forest gives way to more open woodland that extends to the Tigris River in the distance. Small wooden pens stand among the dwellings, where a few young sows and their piglets lie in the sun. Strips of drying deer and gazelle meat hang from nearby racks next to wicker storage bins filled with last year's acorns and pistachios. Two hunters return home, carrying the carcass of a wild boar suspended from a pole between their shoulders. A third hefts a bound and squealing female piglet, which he releases into a pen to join a sow and her young. The men quickly dismember the boar, adding strips of flesh to the drying racks and setting aside the head and neck for the evening meal.

Drought and Domestication

Twelve thousand years ago, a profound revolution in human life began in Southwest Asia, during a time of dramatic climatic change. For millennia, small bands of hunters and foragers had dwelt in an arid world, constantly on the move, their lives anchored to sparse water sources. The landscape was edible to people who knew it intimately—for food, such people had drought-resistant grasses and tubers, deer, rabbits. Above all, they preyed on the gazelle, a small desert antelope that migrated north in spring and south in fall and gave them a relatively predictable food supply. Then, about fifteen thousand years ago,
global warming really took hold as the Ice Age loosened its grip. The climate became warmer and somewhat wetter. What had been semiarid scrubland now supported large tracts of oak, olive, and pistachio trees. Lush meadows nurtured dense stands of wild barley and wheat. So rich were the nut harvests, and so abundant were migrating gazelle, that many peoples settled in much larger communities of several hundred people, which they occupied year round for generations. This was a very different way of life from the existence of their highly mobile ancestors, but like that of their predecessors, it was a life brilliantly calibrated to the realities of their environment.

Between about 14,500 and 13,000 years ago, generations of hunters and foragers lived so well that they founded much larger settlements. They began to bury their dead in cemeteries. The deceased wore seashells and other exotic ornaments that may have reflected more elaborate social organization, as well as a profound reverence for ancestors, those who had occupied the same territory in earlier generations. The warmth and increased rainfall did not last long. About thirteen thousand years ago, a thirteen-hundred-year-long cold drought cycle parched Southwest Asia, known to climatologists as the Younger Dryas, named after an alpine tundra flower. Colder and drier conditions rippled across once well-watered, food-rich landscapes. Many groups responded to greater aridity and nut harvest shortfalls by abandoning permanent settlements and resuming mobile lifeways. The persistent droughts forced people to adapt to a world of more finite food supplies scattered over the landscape in irregular patches. Forests retreated in the face of aridity; wild grass harvests plummeted. Gazelle hunting and more intensive processing of grains and legumes kept society going. Grinding stones for processing plant foods now abounded. These were the centuries when communities across this region of diverse landscapes started cultivating wild grasses in a deliberate attempt to extend their range. They also turned to familiar gregarious ungulates, which relied, just as people did, on predictable water supplies. Again, close juxtaposition of animals to humans became more prevalent. This time the outcome was not companionship, but full domestication of some of the most commonplace of today's farm animals: pigs, goats, and sheep.

Hunters became farmers—no longer on the move, but anchored to fields, flocks, herds, and grazing ranges. The needs of animals transformed the familiar tenor of daily life. Human societies were never the same again. Climate change and drought were not, of course, the only factors behind what has been called the Agricultural Revolution, but they were powerful catalysts for a world in which animals ultimately transformed human society beyond recognition, made cities and civilizations possible, and helped create a global world. Permanent settlement, ownership of herds and individual animals, inheritance, and control of grazing ranges—all these were imperatives, partially imposed by the needs of animal management, that helped change the course of history.

Domesticated Pigs or Merely Managed Ones?

Some twelve thousand years ago, the settlement known to archaeologists as Hallan Çemi lay in the oak-forested eastern foothills of the Taurus Mountains.
¹
Here, the people relied not on wild cereals, but on nut harvests, forest game, and on the ubiquitous gazelle. They hunted both wild goats and sheep, killing mainly older beasts, as one might expect when stalking game among trees. But perhaps their most important quarry was the pig.
Sus scrofa
is a forest animal, adapted to hilly terrain covered with mature trees. Swine feed off leaves and branches, plow and tunnel in the soil, and consume the undergrowth. The hunters would, of course, have had a close familiarity with the home ranges and daily routines of wild pigs, with their eating and sleeping habits. They would have known that a sow with her newly born piglets retires to a leafy nest and remains there for about a week or more before rejoining the group. They would have been wary of fierce males, always formidable adversaries, defending their young. Once the male was out of the way, young sows were easier prey, especially in their nests. Any sow can suckle piglets, so to kill the mother and then capture the piglets and take them back home would have been relatively easy. Once penned, young piglets are soon tamed, and bond readily with humans. These may—and one stresses the word
may
—have been the first farm animals of all, because they were easily controlled when young.