Dogs have been walking alongside humans for tens of thousands of years. We don’t know exactly when this domestication started, and why is even less clear. It may seem by now that people and dogs are meant to live together, but back in prehistory that’s not such an obvious proposition. So what was the meet-cute (or should that be meat-cute?) that sparked this beautiful friendship?
There are a few reasons that would lead people to domesticate dogs. First in the list is the dog’s powerful sense of smell, and ability as a hunter. Mixed species hunting behaviour is not unknown in the natural world, and the abilities of weapon-wielding humans and keen-nosed dogs would surely have complemented each other. Annoyingly, Randall Eaton suggested just this in his 1969 paper “Cooperative hunting by cheetahs and jackals and a theory of domestication of the dog”. Don’t you just hate it when you think you’ve had an original idea, only to find someone beat you to it over fifty years ago? On the plus side, at least it only took a few minutes with Google Scholar to find out. That’s far preferable to coming up with a startling new idea writing it up, and sending it halfway around the world by steamboat, only to find that Darwin had been working on the same thing for years and got it published first. I’m looking at you, Alfred Russel Wallace.
As well as hunting companions, dogs would also have provided protection. Barking at noises or unfamiliar smells from something unseen beyond the glow of the fire. Seeing off unfriendly visitors of the animal or human variety. These credits in the ledger were obviously enough to balance out the debits of competing for food, and the risk that the dogs might occasionally bite the hand that feeds.
Did early humans even play the active role in starting this process? I’m not talking about with cats. That’s a totally different situation. There is no scrap of doubt in my mind that we are the domesticated party in that interspecies relationship. Rather, wolves which were friendlier and less afraid of humans would have been able to scavenge around the edge of camps. Not exactly domesticated but dependent on people like today’s seagulls, rats, and urban foxes. From those early overtures, that careful circling, familiarity grew into domesticity.
However and wherever the domestication event occurred, it was long before the birth of writing so our beloved cuneiform tablets can’t provide much illumination. What they do bring us though is this beautiful pack of pooches. As beautiful as they are, they are blessed with fearsome names befitting their apotropaic function. Loud is his bark! Biter of his foe! Catcher of the enemy! Expeller of evil! And my personal favourite, Don’t think, bite! These five figurines, now in the British Museum, were found buried beneath the threshold of a door in the North Palace of Ashurbanipal (day 49, and there’ll be more on day 69) at Nineveh. This is the perfect spot for a pack of guard dogs, ready to see off unfriendly visitors of the demonic variety.
To close out today, I want to tell you about a cache of school tablets found at Ur. It was common for students of cuneiform to write out proverbs, some of which relate to dogs. One reads: “In the city where no dog is present, the fox is overseer” – Sumerian for “when the cat’s away the mice will play”. But my favourite of the lot shows just how similar the dogs of 3500 years ago are to the good boys of today: “The dog understands ‘take it!’ but doesn’t understand putting it down.” I see an excited fetch-playing dog, drool-soaked ball in mouth, demanding “no take, only throw!” The real question is how could we not bring such joyful creatures into our camps?
