My European Family

by Karin Bojs

  ***

  The question of when wolves became dogs has been the subject of heated debate for many decades. There is a great deal of prestige at stake. Dogs were our very first domesticated animals and are still known as ‘man’s best friend’.

  In the past, archaeologists tried to distinguish dogs from wolves solely according to the appearance of their fossilised bones. Their main assumption was that dogs which had benefited from the care of humans for many generations could be expected to become smaller and slighter than wolves, and to look different in some way.

  On the basis of these definitions, there are many possible early dogs, the oldest of which is over 30,000 years old. There are fossil remains from Russia, Ukraine, the Czech Republic, Switzerland and Belgium. Some of the finds that are claimed to be early dogs come from the excavations at Dolní Věstonice in the Czech Republic, described in Chapter 5.

  Over the last 20 years, geneticists have joined the discussion, basing their arguments on DNA analyses of varying degrees of exhaustiveness and calculations that vary in sophistication. They have still not reached a consensus, to put it mildly. However, the current state of knowledge can be summarised as follows.

  The ancestor of today’s dogs appears to have been domesticated at least 15,000 years ago, and possibly much earlier. The place of birth of the first dog was probably somewhere in Europe or Siberia, though China cannot be ruled out.

  People may well have tried to tame wolves even earlier. There are 30,000-year-old fossils from the Altai Mountains of Siberia and Belgium’s Goyet cave that resemble dogs, which may well indicate that such attempts were made. However, they do not appear to be the forerunners of modern dogs, but genetic dead ends.

  All of today’s dogs – African basenji, the wild dingoes of Australia, blue-eyed Siberian huskies, neatly blow-dried miniature poodles and playful Labradors – seem to have a common origin in one specific group of wolves from Europe or Asia. These wolves are probably long extinct, which makes it more difficult to establish kinship. But when researchers compare DNA from fossil wolves tens of thousands of years old with both fossil dogs and contemporary specimens, the pattern emerges more clearly.

  One of the problems facing researchers is that domesticated dogs have sometimes interbred with wild wolves, as shown by the DNA of hunting dogs in Scandinavia and half-wild dogs in China, for example. This interbreeding makes the picture fuzzier. However, the basic pattern remains. When we left Africa, we had no dogs with us. It was not until we reached Europe and Asia that we came across wolves. We tamed them at some point during the Ice Age, during a period when we were still hunter-gatherers, and before some of us crossed Beringia and made our way down into the Americas.

  The question is why. What use were dogs to us?

  ***

  Over the years, I have interviewed nearly a dozen of the world’s leading dog researchers, and have been given nearly as many diverging explanations for why dogs and people started to live together.

  Many researchers believe that it was not people that domesticated dogs, at least not initially – it was dogs that domesticated us. Ice Age people hunted wolves for their pelts, and wolves must have regarded us as dangerous. But they also saw the advantages that humans offered. We left large piles of food behind us, the remnants of our prey that we were unable to use ourselves. We dumped the carrion left over from our hunting on the edge of our temporary settlements, as it stank and attracted predators.

  Wolves would go in search of these leftovers at night, when people had gathered round their fires or were asleep. Sometimes, especially at dawn and dusk, humans and wolves might encounter one another. That could end with the human killing the wolf. But on one occasion the wolf was simply too appealing. Maybe it was a little cub, a good-natured trusting little pup that no one with a heart could bring themselves to kill. So instead, the little wolf cub was allowed to sit at the fire among the humans, and to play with the children. Anyone who has ever seen a young child and a puppy playing together will know just what I mean.

  The millennia passed, and wolves that were able to control their aggression and endear themselves to people had found a new niche enabling them to survive. This was a case of what biologists call ‘artificial selection’; traits valued by humans were more likely to be passed on to the next generation.

  Many scientists have examined which genes differentiate wolves from dogs. A large proportion of these genes affect the brain first and foremost. The US researcher Robert Wayne, for example, has detected a particular genetic mutation that seems to be present in all dogs, but not in wolves. A similar mutation can be found in people with the congenital condition known as Williams–Beuren syndrome. Such people generally have slight learning difficulties. But the most striking feature of people with Williams–Beuren syndrome is their friendly, outgoing and trusting nature.

  Many other features that differentiate dogs from wolves – in terms of both character traits and appearance – have to do with the more childlike nature of dogs. They resemble wolf cubs more than adult wolves; they are playful and good-natured rather than serious and intense. In many cases, dogs also have more stubby noses and shorter legs than adult wolves, just like wolf cubs.

  Moreover, dogs also have an exceptional ability to read people’s thoughts. Many experiments have shown how they can understand what we want. They can follow our gaze and look at the things we point out. Other animals, such as chimpanzees, wolves and cats, can be at least as intelligent in many other respects. Yet they cannot compete with dogs in tests based on understanding human behaviour.

  The nights were cold during the Ice Age, and people may have used their first dogs as cushions, to keep warm. The archaeologist Lars Larsson told me that even today Australian aboriginals speak of ‘one-dog’, ‘two-dog’ and ‘three-dog nights’, the ‘three-dog night’ being the coldest of all.

  Others believe that people first benefited from wolves’ function as guard dogs. They would lie at the edge of the camp, feasting on leftover meat. Little by little they began to spend the night there. Wolves and dogs sleep far more lightly than humans. If another, more dangerous predator approached – a lion, for instance – they would begin to howl loudly. This would wake the humans, who could then defend themselves.

  Helping humans to hunt must have been one of the functions dogs fulfilled from an early stage. One of wolves’ inherited behavioural characteristics is the propensity to hunt in packs. Much has been written about how hunting dogs may have enabled humans to hunt more effectively, especially the big game of the Ice Age, such as mammoths and woolly rhinoceroses. According to some theories, the large animals in Europe, Asia and the Americas faced rapid extinction once humans and dogs began to hunt together. But there is no consensus on this. Some new findings indicate that dogs and humans are blameless in this regard; mammoths and woolly rhinos are more likely to have died out because the climate became warmer, bringing changes in vegetation.

  Martin Street is the archaeologist who has done most work in recent years on the dog from Bonn-Oberkassel. His theory is that what is known as ‘putting the game at bay’ was one of the first important tasks performed by dogs. This is a method of hunting still used today in many places, including the forests of Sweden. The dog runs around in the woods on its own to track game, while the hunter tries to stay near it. Once the dog locates its quarry, it starts to bark, forcing the animal to stop moving and focus on the dog’s irritating barking. The dog has put its quarry at bay. In the meantime, the hunter creeps nearer and shoots the animal.

  This type of hunting emerged when woods started to grow on the tundra, blocking the view. Before that time it was easier for hunters to scan the landscape for their prey from an elevated point. This is what makes it so interesting that the first dog universally recognised as such, the one from Bonn-Oberkassel, lived 14,500 years ago, at precisely the time when the tundra of the Ice Age was beginning to give way to woodland. That circumstance, in my view, is rather too striking to be a mere coinci
dence.

  If we began to use dogs even earlier, during the colder periods of the Ice Age, I believe transport must have been one of their major functions. Dogs may have been used as pack animals and may also have pulled sleds and people on skis. They may have enabled us to move around and maintain networks over very considerable distances. Admittedly, no devices that would have enabled dogs to carry a load or pull sleds or skis have been preserved. However, such artefacts would have been made of wood and other organic material, and the chance of such substances surviving tens of thousands of years is minimal.

  Conceivably, the first function dogs fulfilled for people may have been to provide a source of food. If this was the case, keeping domesticated dogs would have been a way of ensuring access to meat in hard times. The researcher who mentioned this possibility to me was Peter Savolainen, one of the foremost advocates of the theory that dogs originated in China.

  Savolainen, who works at Stockholm’s Royal Institute of Technology, was among the first researchers to conduct a large-scale comparison of dogs’ mitochondrial DNA; I reported on his study in Dagens Nyheter back in 1997. He and his collaborators attended dog shows and collected hair from several hundred dogs, which they then compared with wolves from different parts of the world. The original purpose of the research was to enable forensic technicians to use DNA profiles to identify the breed of a dog that had left traces at a crime scene. However, the researchers soon realised that their work could also be used to identify dogs’ place of origin. Their results suggested that wolves first became dogs in South-east Asia, which happens to be a region where people eat dog meat to this day.

  When in Hanoi, northern Vietnam, which lies within the region identified by Savolainen, I once visited a curious street full of specialist restaurants – all cheek by jowl – whose menus featured dog meat. Some Vietnamese people like taking Europeans there to tease them about the habit of eating dog meat, as they know full well that we generally regard it as totally taboo. The Vietnamese journalist who accompanied me in Hanoi explained that he and the people he knew kept dogs as pets, just as Europeans do, and developed strong emotional ties with them. Yet they may also eat dog meat on occasion. There are, quite simply, two contrasting attitudes.

  A similar pattern is also discernable in excavations from the European Stone Age. Some dogs were clearly highly respected family members honoured by distinguished burials. Other dog bones bear scratch marks from tools – which may well indicate that people ate their flesh. Both types of remains have been found at Lake Hornborga in Sweden, the oldest being about 10,000 years old.

  Peter Savolainen’s early conclusion that dogs originated in South-east Asia is strongly contested today, particularly since other researchers have begun to analyse DNA from ancient fossils of dogs and wolves. Today there is at least as much evidence to suggest that dogs originated in Europe.

  Savolainen may, of course, be correct in his theory that dogs’ first role in relation to humans was to provide a reserve of food. But they may also have been companions and playmates, warm cushions, a means of transport, guard dogs and hunting dogs. One possibility need not exclude the other. Beyond a doubt, our first function as far as dogs were concerned was to keep them fed.

  Nor should we underestimate the importance of affection. Surely the feelings that today’s dog owners have towards their animals also existed during the Ice Age. After all, those of my kinsfolk who lived in the Bonn-Oberkassel region 14,500 years ago – the man and woman from the U5b1 haplogroup – were accompanied by a dog on their way to the happy hunting grounds.

  Chapter Eight

  Doggerland

  The dog, the man and the woman from the Bonn-Oberkassel burial site lived at a time of great upheavals. Just a few centuries earlier, parts of Europe had felt the impact of a pulse of warmth that augured the end of the Ice Age.

  The harshest period of cold was over. The earth had been slowly thawing out for several millennia. The path of our orbit around the sun had changed, following the repeated cyclical phases known as Milankovitch cycles. More and more solar energy was reaching the earth. Melting snow and ice left dark water and soil exposed, further heightening the earth’s capacity to absorb more solar radiation.

  In addition to this global warming, temperatures changed dramatically at a regional level. Within just a few hundred years – possibly even faster – the average temperature in north-western Europe rose by several degrees. This was probably due to shifts in Atlantic currents.

  It may sound as if the growing mildness of the climate, once so cold, must have been a blessing for Ice Age people. Yet I am not sure they saw it that way to begin with. The change seems to have been so rapid that they had no time to acclimatise. Within a mere generation or so, the hunters of the Ice Age were forced to change a way of life that had served their forebears well for many thousands of years.

  In the longer term, the warmer climate brought a great improvement in living conditions. Higher temperatures and more precipitation meant richer vegetation and hence more prey. This enabled more people to survive and reproduce. DNA analyses show that the hunters who peopled Europe multiplied rapidly at the end of the Ice Age. But now they had to learn to hunt the new kinds of prey that thrived in the new forests, or to follow the reindeer on their migrations north and eastward.

  Those who followed the reindeer due north from Bonn-Oberkassel would have reached Doggerland, a land mass that no longer exists. Today it lies beneath the North Sea. Sometimes the Dogger Bank is mentioned in weather reports. But Doggerland, now part of the seabed, once extended from Denmark to Scotland. When the land mass was at its largest – about 20,000 years ago, during the coldest period of the Ice Age – it probably stretched as far north as the Shetland Islands. Doggerland was separated from the Norwegian coast by a narrow strip of deep sea, corresponding to what we now know as the ‘Norwegian trench’. Midway between the Shetlands and the area now occupied by the Norwegian city of Bergen were mountains, dubbed the ‘Viking-Bergen Island’ in retrospect.

  For certain periods, Doggerland may well have been one of the most favourable habitats anywhere in the Europe of the time: fertile land criss-crossed by freshwater rivers, with ample access to game.

  In a display cabinet in the Danish National Museum, Copenhagen, I have seen tools and art objects made of bone and antler that were fashioned many thousands of years ago by people living in Doggerland. Some of them have turned up in fishermen’s nets, while others were found washed up on Danish beaches. Underwater archaeologists have searched for sunken settlements off the coasts.

  Back in the nineteenth century, oyster fishermen began to find strange bones from mammoths and reindeer in the waters off the coast of Britain. In 1931 the British trawler Colinda dragged up a barbed spearhead made of antler that has been dated at nearly 12,000 years old. Since then, fishermen, divers, archaeologists and geologists have discovered many objects that tell us how prehistoric people lived in the area that is now part of the seabed. But the latest information about the sunken land comes from a different and unexpected source.

  ***

  I travel to Bradford, England, to interview the archaeologist Vincent Gaffney, the director of a major project that resulted in – among other things – Europe’s Lost World: The Rediscovery of Doggerland. This book, published in 2009, is the most extensive overview of the subject to appear so far.

  Had I been travelling 10,000 years ago, I could have walked dry-shod all the way from Sweden to Bradford. Instead, I fly to London and take the train to northern England. Despite the great beauty of the green, rolling countryside that surrounds it, the inner city itself strikes me as depressing. The glory days of the textiles industry are long gone. Few visitors come here of their own accord these days. A woman on the train asks me why on earth I want to visit Bradford.

  But the University of Bradford clearly has a strong reputation. It turns out that Vincent Gaffney was appointed there after a conflict with the University of Birmingham, his previous emp
loyer.

  We are meant to be meeting in the morning, but at the last minute Gaffney is called away to a meeting at his new university. Instead, we meet late in the evening in the hotel bar. It is an unusually muddled interview. I confine myself to two small ciders, but Gaffney manages to down three large beers. A red-haired man in his sixties, he is already pretty lively at the start of the evening. As the hours pass and the level of beer in his glass sinks, I find it increasingly difficult to channel his verbal outpourings. However, the flashes of wit and the wild associations he comes out with are underpinned by brilliant, groundbreaking archaeology.

  Gaffney began his career as a specialist in Roman remains in the Mediterranean region, but over the years he came to focus on remote analysis – a variety of methods for investigating land at a distance, without the need for excavation. He was running a course on the subject for doctoral students at the University of Birmingham when a student asked which region he most longed to research. ‘Doggerland’ was the obvious answer, as much of European prehistory is likely to be preserved there, on the seabed. The young doctoral student then proposed they work together, using data from oil companies prospecting for gas and oil. That was an option Gaffney had not previously considered.

  They managed to link up with a geologist with expertise in surveying North Sea oil and gas deposits – exactly the relevant field. With his assistance, they were able to access a large quantity of data, which they processed by computer.

  The technology they applied, 3-D seismic surveying, normally serves to probe layers much further down in the seabed, where oil deposits can sometimes be found. The archaeologists, however, wanted to conduct a more superficial survey, going down just a few metres. They were delighted that the method proved equally effective for their purposes. Within just 18 months, the research team was able to put together a detailed map of a section of Doggerland the size of the Netherlands. They created an image of a whole landscape, with lakes, wetlands, estuaries, mountains and plains. It was crossed by a large river, which they named the Shotton, after a distinguished geologist.