by Dan Flores
One of the most intriguing questions about Coyote is this: Why did these first, ancient settlers of North America pick this particular animal as their deity? Ten millennia ago the first Americans would have had many scores of animal candidates for their deity figures. Charismatic creatures like mammoths or dire wolves or saber-tooth cats might seem to us more likely choices, and in the early stages of human settlement, perhaps they had been gods. I speculate that as the Wisconsin Ice Age gave way to a rapidly warming world, coupled with the great simplifying event known as the Pleistocene Extinctions (which took all three of my suggested species and many others), wild coyotes captured the imaginations of the Indian peoples of the time as creatures endowed with special abilities. I suspect that the coyote’s evident skill in surviving those profound changes, when the big, charismatic species could not, attracted human attention. An easy identification with the social lives of predatory wild coyotes also probably made them feel familiar to human hunters.
In Pueblo Gods and Myths, anthropologist Hamilton Tyler writes, “The ability of an animal to become a god is in part due to his symbolic potential; which is to say, the number of ideas he can stand for.… A god, even the simplest god, is based upon a certain amount of abstraction in the human mind.” Another anthropologist, Lewis Hyde, writes in Trickster Makes This World, “Coyote stories point to coyotes to teach about the mind; the stories themselves look to predator-prey relationships for the birth of cunning.” Hyde continues, “One reason native observers may have chosen coyote the animal to be Coyote the Trickster is that the former in fact does exhibit a great plasticity of behavior and is, therefore, a consummate survivor in a shifting world.” In a world of giant animals whose fates seemed so mortal, coyotes were almost magical.
Especially before our lives in cities, which obscured our deep dependency on nature and diverted our powers of observation, we humans were profound observers of the natural world. Early Americans would not have failed to notice one other characteristic of wild coyotes in a dangerous and changing world: that their uncanny ability to survive everything nature threw at them lay in a remarkable intelligence. The trickster that Lewis Hyde mentions is a very old human religious figure; found in many animistic religions around the world, he takes the form of many creatures—hares, spiders, blue jays, ravens, even humans, like the Norse trickster Loki. But across America, the coyote took up the mantle in the critical formulation of a god who lived by his wits. Having a smart god, after all, was crucial to survival, as well as to penetrating human nature and the animal within.
Soon after coyotes came to the attention of Western science, a debate raged among naturalists about whether these animals were in fact a kind of American jackal, related to the side-striped, black-backed, and Simien jackals of Africa or the golden jackals of Africa/Eurasia. Plenty of people in the nineteenth century looked at coyotes and saw jackals. Some still do. Biologist friends in Yellowstone Park told me about an African biologist who visited recently and had little interest in the wolves. Instead, he wanted to see coyotes, and when he did, he cut straight to a suspicion he obviously already held: “That’s a jackal,” he told them.
However much jackals and coyotes satisfy the old naturalist-derived kinship models of close resemblance, modern molecular genetics shows, as mentioned above, that some jackals separated from the wolf line 5 million years ago, about the same time that humans and chimps were diverging from a common ancestor. The golden jackal is genetically distant from the coyote it so strikingly resembles, again, by about 4 percent. We humans are also distant from gibbons, another of our primate cousins, by about the same amount. Perhaps to other species, humans, orangutans, and gibbons are tough to tell apart too.
The method for determining kinship among species has changed drastically in recent decades. A major 2009 publication on the evolution of North American canids, produced by the American Museum of Natural History, represents the classic approach to animal evolutionary relationships, determining kinship based on examinations of fossil ancestors and morphological measurements. I spoke with one of the study’s authors, Dr. Xiaoming Wang of the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History, who told me that the fossil evidence is clear that the Canidae family evolved in North America, probably in what is now the American Southwest, about 5.3 million years ago. Fossils indicate that wolves and coyotes indeed share a distant common ancestor. Dr. Wang posits this was a species paleontologists know as Canis lepophagus, a primitive Ice Age wolf that, like American horses, became geographically widespread by crossing the land bridges connecting America to Eurasia. Some of this primitive wolf’s populations spread beyond America as early as 3.5 million years ago. Others stayed behind.
Golden jackal, the coyote’s distant cousin in Africa, southern Europe, and southern Asia. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
Continuing evolution of this particular canid line back home in North America led to a species that may be at the center of several current scientific debates about wolves and coyotes. Canis edwardii was a small wolf of American roots whose oldest fossilized remains come from 3-million-year-old Blancan Age sites scattered from California to Nebraska to West Texas. Maintaining a presence in North America for the next 2.5 million years—as late as the 1960s and 1970s, some wondered if it had ever gone extinct—C. edwardii was somewhere in size between a coyote and a gray wolf, although in early forms it lacked the sagittal crest that characterizes both wolves and coyotes today. But Wang and the paleontologists from the American Museum of Natural History are convinced that roughly 800,000 years ago, from some population of this early wolf, American environmental conditions began to select for smaller, quicker canids. But would these smaller, more refined successors replace the larger, wolfier ancestor in North America? Or would both survive?
We modern humans are fairly uncommon evolutionarily in having replaced all the progenitors in our line. But while we are the sole surviving species in our genus now, this was not always so. Modern humans evolved in Africa some 300,000 years ago, but especially once we spread out of Africa and into Europe and Asia 45,000 years ago, we had to share the world with two other species in the genus Homo. The Neanderthals and Denisovans had preceded us in leaving Africa and adapting to cold climates in Asia and Europe. So for at least a few thousand years—some argue for 15,000—down to some truly epic moment when the last Neanderthals passed, we lived alongside them. Probably, we also exterminated them. But most intriguingly of all, at least occasionally, individuals from these different groups of humans seduced one another. We preserve some of the genetic markers of those other genomes in our own, but we ended up as the only species of Homo left on Earth. That’s not quite how things have played out so far in the genus Canis.
The wolfy ancestor, C. edwardii, produced several lines of smaller canids, and Wang’s interpretation of the fossil evidence yields a better explanation for why some naturalists confused coyotes and jackals. Roughly 1 million years ago, a population of these smaller versions of C. edwardii migrated across a land bridge to the Old World and became Canis aureus, the golden jackal, the animal that had some early naturalists convinced that coyotes were American versions of this Eurasian/African jackal. Meanwhile, the related small C. edwardii offspring that remained and continued to evolve in North America became our own Canis latrans and other closely related forms. These early coyotes spread across America, with specimens appearing in the fossil record from California and Colorado to Pennsylvania and West Virginia.
In North America, events seem to have unfolded with coyotes and their edwardii ancestors something like they did with us and Neanderthals. As closely related species in the same genus, they coexisted—one a wolf, the offspring a wolflike coyote—in an America where the ebb and flow of glacial ages produced not just the rapid evolution and extinction of many species but land bridges that brought grand migrations of new creatures into America. As the climate swung wildly from icy to warm, habitats changed with dizzying speed. At places like the La Brea Tar Pits in Southern California, the fo
ssil assemblages of the late Pleistocene, from 1 million down to about 11,000 years ago, show that Canis edwardii and Canis latrans were in fact present side by side at kill sites, much as modern humans and Neanderthals appear to have shared different parts of the same valleys in France and Germany during the last Ice Age.
But what if another hominid, or better, a couple of them, had joined us in the Gorges de l’Ardèche in southern France 40,000 years ago? In effect, that’s what happened to the American canids in the late Pleistocene. For 3.5 million years the descendants of that original migrating American wolf, Canis lepophagus, had been evolving in Asia. Now, as the great beasts of the late Pleistocene—mammoths, mastodons, long-horned bison—migrated out of Siberia across the Bering land bridge to range among vast herds of horses and camels on the mid-latitude plains of North America, gray wolves followed them. A lepophagus descendant called Canis chihliensis, which lived in China around 2.7 million years ago, in the late Pliocene, seems to have been the progenitor of these newly migrating wolves. The first of its offspring to return to its American homeland was a wolf known to paleontologists as Canis armbrusteri. We know of this large wolf from fossils in the American Southwest dating to 2.5 million years ago, but it is most famous for begetting a species of giant wolves never forgotten by anyone who has ever read about them (or watched Game of Thrones). A quarter million years ago, Canis dirus, the gigantic dire wolf, seems to have emerged as a species on this Great Plains Eden of the Animals, where it joined American wolves and early coyotes in the hunt.
The world of American canids was about to get even more crowded because another large wolf stemming from the previous million years of Eurasian wolf evolution was coming. Canis lupus, the modern gray wolf, arrived in Europe (the famous “Wolf Event”) 1 million years ago. Its late origins may have been in Siberia, where it probably evolved in response to the presence of so many large grazing prey animals. But just as they followed the great herds in Europe—all those magnificent creatures our modern human ancestors painted on the limestone walls of Chauvet Cave 30,000 years ago—gray wolves also accompanied similar herds that followed ice-free corridors from Siberia into America. The gray wolf, much changed from its travels abroad, was coming home.
Canis lupus, like us humans, was a relatively late arrival in America. Both Asian humans and Asian wolves entered North America only in the last 20,000 years. But once it joined the hunting and scavenging of other American canids in the grand predator picnic of the Pleistocene, the gray wolf decidedly made its presence felt. Like velociraptors, the meat-eating dinosaurs that filled a similar niche in the Americas 65 million years earlier, gray wolves formed packs to hunt medium-size herbivores like bison and elk. A modern American ecology began to take shape.
No doubt to everyone’s relief, neither the frightening short-faced bear nor dire wolves the size of small horses were destined to survive the Pleistocene. Roughly 10,000 years ago, our last dramatic extinction event, the Pleistocene Extinctions, carried away many of the African-like giants that roamed America then. Late-arriving gray wolves survived, however, and so did America’s own early forms of coyotes. But losing thirty-two genera of the most dramatic animals of the continent forever changed the world of American predators, one of them particularly.
The evolution of a predator has more to do with its prey base than with its competition with other predators, but at this point in the coyote’s history, competition with wolves emerged as a powerful shaper. Studies of the fossils of Rancho La Brea Tar Pits show how this probably worked in coyote evolution. In the late Pleistocene, a coyote subspecies that paleobiologists call Canis latrans orcutti appeared most commonly at kill sites alongside gray wolves, dire wolves, and American wolves. This subspecies is intriguing for what its fossils say about its size, and presumably its niche, back then. Orcutti coyotes were almost wolf-sized, with far more massive heads and dentition than modern coyotes. As long as America’s Pleistocene bestiary had remained intact, packs of C. l. orcutti had clearly prowled the kill sites, competing with various kinds of true wolves for the largesse of the Pleistocene.
But in the wake of the Pleistocene Extinctions, as large grazer after large grazer disappeared from North America, the coyotes of 10,000 years ago did something wolves did not: they shrank. As the extinctions significantly altered the remaining prey base, and presumably as competition between gray wolves and the strapping Pleistocene coyotes intensified, the adaptive genius of the coyote was to back away and seek out new, smaller prey, creatures that didn’t have to be brought down by packs but could succumb to individual efforts. Wolves remained big, five- to six-foot-long pack hunters weighing 80 to 120 pounds. Coyotes shrank to become three- to four-foot-long, twenty-five- to forty-five-pound hunters of smaller game. They became scavengers, even omnivores. The most recent work on coyote evolution in this critical period, in an article in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, puts the matter directly: “Interactions among carnivores and their prey are the probable cause of evolutionary change in coyotes.”
Coyote scat filled with juniper berries, part of coyotes’ omnivorous diet and perhaps an astringent against worms. Courtesy Dan Flores.
This evolution conferred on the coyote a rare and remarkable adaptation, one familiar to anyone who knows the deep history of our own species. In the coyotes’ case, this trait would go far in helping them become so unique, so resilient under mortality pressures, and so successful across the next hundred centuries of North American history. Coyotes share this adaptation with very few other species, but they do share it with us.
Like canids, all humans are intensely social. But we developed a unique kind of social life. The anthropological term for the flexibility we show as a social species is the same as the zoological term: “fission-fusion.” Translated, that means that among a rare few species, evolutionary pressures have selected for sociality that allows for unusual flexibility among individuals, who can be either gregarious or solitary as conditions warrant. In sociality of this type, individuals cooperate with other members of their species to take on any manner of large endeavors. Most readily this occurs among closely related individuals, although some anthropologists believe that our next step—cooperation among nonrelated groups—enabled modern humans to colonize the planet. But species that show fission-fusion adaptations also allow for more individualized effort under other circumstances, a flexibility that can confer tremendous survival and colonizing advantages during disease outbreaks and other intense mortality events. Despite the myth of the “lone wolf,” the gray wolf is not a fission-fusion carnivore; it evolved as a specialized pack animal to pursue large prey. Its strong pack ties and lack of social flexibility became near-fatal flaws among wolves in the modern age, when we learned to use their social instincts to trap and poison them. Their sociality, in fact, enabled us to extirpate wolves in the United States.
Most predators are either solitary or social, not both. But like us, the coyote gets to have it both ways. Real danger from larger gray wolves fashioned a plasticity in its behavior, giving it the flexibility to move freely between joining a collective and pursuing individual or pair strategies. As circumstances called for it, coyotes could become pack animals when catching prey like deer (or defending against wolves) called for cooperation. But coyotes could also function very well as solitary hunters, focusing on the kind of small fare—mice, voles, rabbits, even insects, and a wide array of vegetable foods such as juniper berries—that an individual animal could survive on. (While they have the teeth and jaws of a predator, coyotes also possess molars that enable them to grind and chew vegetables.) Less pack-adapted than wolves, coyotes even evince fewer facial expressions. For coyotes, fission-fusion created possibilities that allowed them to carve out an ecological niche in post-Pleistocene America different from those of both wolves and foxes. When, centuries later, twentieth-century American predator policy resolved on exterminating them, they used that biological flexibility to help thwart the effort.
But long before that, the genius of post-Pleistocene coyotes’ lifestyles attracted the attention of America’s first human inhabitants, who appear to have seen so much of themselves in the coyotes around them.
Coyote, in the earliest mythologies of North America, is not actually what one might call the Ultimate Cause god. More often, as in Coyote stories from people like the Salish and Nez Perce, he is the immortal right-hand helper of some abstract First Cause. His divinity is only semi, perhaps because he is present on Earth and engaged among humans. Most often in the stories, however, Coyote inhabits the world before humans are on the scene. Sometimes his initial form is human, which he gives up for his coyote body once humans are present. In stories set following his creation of the continent, though, Coyote is commonly a kind of anthropomorphic animal. In effect he is a Coyote Man. He preserves a tail, sharp muzzle, and erect ears, but he stands and walks upright, has a wife and family, and displays normal human fixations on status, food, fun, and lust. He is also capable of shape-shifting into a form so humanlike that often the other characters in a story only suspect, due to his behavior, that they are dealing with Coyote himself.
When one reads American Coyote stories, it does not take much time or analytic effort to conclude who Coyote really is, and it is that realization that makes him so intriguing as a god. Coyote is us in avatar form, or perhaps something more like The God Within. In the beginning myths the Coyote Man semideity’s function is creation itself. Coyote takes the basic structure of the world as set in motion by the First Cause, then “improves” on it and gives it the natural laws that make it work. That done, his larger purpose in the many oral stories about him is to reveal the “man” component of his personality. Fascinating to me, unlike a perfect deity—such as Carl Jung’s “savior” figure or a Jesus who teaches a codified morality and sets himself up as role model to humans striving for godlike perfection—Coyote personifies the full suite of humanity’s traits. He is a god who is not merely good but also, transparently, very, very bad.