Hi, cave

Was talking to a Vegan (I'll talk to anybody) I used to go running with, and we got onto the controversial subject of increasing incidence of blindness associated with veg oils and margarines. This is big in Australia, watch out for it as a big World Wide thing in the next year. I said that this is what you get for not eating the fats we are programmed to eat.

He made an interesting comment that (He's a member of our State Vegetarian and Vegan Assoc. and is into all the theories) that we have only been eating meat for about 10,000 years because we domesticated the wolf and could now hunt for game with our doggies. Prior to that we stuck to nuts and berries.

I'm not a quick thinker, being male, and it occurred to me later that if the Wolf is the thing, then here's a simple test of the theory. Most of our members here seem to reside in North America, so can you tell me:

Apart from the Husky and related Malamute which it is commonly believed were domesticated in Siberia and came with early humans over the Bering Land bridge, and of course not to mention the chihuahua:

Did the Indigenous American Nations, before the European Conquest, ever domesticate the wolf and have thier own breeds of dogs?
I used to show dogs (fox terriers) and apart from the huskies and the chi I don't recall any other ancient American breeds.

If the hunting Americans (conceding that in later centuries many Nations developed agriculture, e.g the spud) didn't have dogs then this seems to refute the idea that we didn't eat meat until we got wolves on side with us.

cheers

Michael Gardner
Australia

Sorry I failed to mention the Mexican Hairless but I can't imagine it ripping the throat out of a Caribou

Michael

Dogs are useful for hunting but not essential. How could humans eat nuts and berries during the ice age or during winter? OK, nuts I may understand - if they spent the whole nut season picking nuts and doing nothing else - but berries? :puzzled:

Anyway, here's what I found:

http://www.ualberta.ca/~jzgurski/dog.htm
The oldest dog remains found in the Americas are from Danger Cave, Utah and date back to 9 000 - 10 000 years B.P. However, early dogs most likely resembled wolves morphologically, so it is possible that very old dog fossils are often classified as wolf fossils. Overall, the early archaeological record of dogs is rather poor, since most Palaeolithic sites contain very few canid remains, and the ones that are found tend to consist of only small fragments of bone which are difficult to accurately identify.

The question as to whether or not there were two domestication events in the Old World and the New World has also been addressed recently through the use of molecular data. Leonard et al. (2002) isolated DNA from the bones of 37 dogs found at archaeological sites in Mexico, Peru and Bolivia. All bones were deposited before the arrival of Columbus in the New World. A 425 base pair fragment of mtDNA was sequenced from 13 of the specimens. Ancient dog specimens were used to represent American dogs because modern dogs in the Americas may contain mtDNA from dogs imported from the Old World because they likely interbred with them in the past. The ancient Latin American dog sequences were compared to fragments from a number of modern dogs and grey wolves. The ancient Latin American dogs did not appear to be as closely related to North American grey wolves as they were to Eurasian grey wolves and dogs, suggesting that North American dogs are the descendants of Eurasian grey wolves.

However, since the remains examined came from regions of Latin America where wolves were either rare or absent, remains from dog bones preserved in Alaska were used to obtain DNA for the analysis of the same fragment of mtDNA examined in the Latin American dogs. These dog remains are from 1450-1675 C.E., after Europeans had began to colonize North America. However, they date from before the first sighting of Alaska by Europeans, so these remains are likely from true North American dogs. Eight different sequences were found in the eleven samples examined, and five were unique to these dogs. As was the case with the Latin American dogs, an analysis of the sequences suggested that the ancient Alaskan dogs were likely the descendants of Eurasian wolves and not North American ones.

These results suggest that both ancient and modern dogs throughout the world are descendants of Old World wolves. This means that the people who colonized the Americas 12 -14 000 years B.P. must have been accompanied by dogs, as no separate domestication event occurred in the New World. If dogs originated about 12 - 14 000 years ago, they must have spread across several continents in a relatively short period of time. In addition, the large amount of variation found in the ancient dog mtDNA sequences suggests that the Eurasian dogs brought to the Americas were already quite genetically diverse. It is also interesting to note that some of the ancient North American dogs possessed mtDNA sequences that were not seen in any of over 350 modern dogs. The authors of the study suggested that this is because North American dogs have essentially been replaced by Old World dogs as North American dogs were crossed with Old World dogs. A study involving modern Mexican hairless dogs (also called the Xoloitzcuintli) also supports this (Vila et al., 1997). This breed has existed in Mexico for at least 2 000 years, but modern representatives of the breed possess mtDNA haplotypes that are indistinguishable from the haplotypes of European dogs, suggesting that this breed was crossed with Old World dogs extensively in the past.

Excellent! just what I thought.

Whilst I cannot even begin to approach the level of scholarship of your post, it bears a distinct relation to the Dingo in Australia.

What happened with the Dingo is that they were introduced by Aboriginal Populations who arrived about 40 thousand years ago, but since then the Indigenous population has abandoned them as companion animals and they have become totally feral.

Since the European Invasion of the last two centuries old world dogs have interbred with the dingo but a few "wild" strains exist, particularly on uninhabited offshore large islands such as Fraser Island in Queensland where the strain is almost "pure". These dogs are almost identical to dogs found in south East Asia, in Thailand etc.

Until about 200 years ago, Australian Aborigines had no agriculture in the traditional sense, although they performed periodic "burn offs" of the bush to regenerate pastures for hunted animals.

The fact that they remained hunters and gatherers, whilst abandoning their previous (for whatever) relation with canids suggests that dogs were, to them, not useful in their hunting lifestyle.

best regards

Michael Gardner
Australia

Great resoning there, Michael.
I'm thinking about the stone tools, the spears and the knives made out of sharp rock found all over the place in archaeological sites. What did pre-agricultural humans do with spears and knives? Pick apples and chop lettuce? :P There have been found animal bones with markings on them that show they've been hunted and butchered, dating as far back as 2.5 mil years ago, according to Encarta.

Yeah, and all of those cultures were just waiting for the domestication of the dog before they could hunt shellfish and seafood. Until then, they had to subsist on seaweed and dune grass.

How about a word from the scientists?
From National Geographic
"About 12,000 years ago hunter-gatherers in what is now Israel placed a body in a grave with its hand cradling a pup. Whether it was a dog or a wolf can’t be known. Either way, the burial is among the earliest fossil evidence of the dog’s domestication. Scientists know the process was under way by about 14,000 years ago but do not agree on why."


And yet, there's evidence we hunted or scavenged meat a long time before that.

"One investigator, Raymond Dart, who named the original Australopithecus africanus specimen, saw the fragments as broken in such a way as to suggest that not only were these early human creatures hunting lots of other animals, but they were hunting their own species as well. The many skulls had the bases broken away, often seen as a sign of cannibalism because this is how you process animal skulls from which you want to eat the brains (yummy, and very nutritious too!). Another investigator, Robert Brain, interpreted them as evidence that something else broke the bones, site formation processes acting upon them after they were deposited as remains of meals of other carnivores such as big cats." 3.9 and 3.0 million years ago
and
"Where is Koobi Fora and what is the evidence there? In Kenya, eastern Africa, where hominid remains, animal bones, and tools and stone fragments are arranged in enough proximity to suggest living floors where groups of early humans gathered. " 2.4 - 1.3 million years ago
and
"What is important at the site of Zhoukoudian? Another classic site with a romantic story, these caves near Beijing also produced many Homo erectus skeletons early in the 20th century. The bones are now lost, though we have casts, but also there was some good archaeology. Animal remains and fires suggest hunting and cooking of some 96 mammal species, including extinct deer, elephant, and bear, though Lewis Binford and others are now questioning the site formation processes and asking if these can also be the remains of scavenging killed meat." 1.8 million and 300,000 years ago
and
"What was found at the East African sites of Kalambo Falls and Olorgesailie? The former produced Lower Paleolithic plant remains, such as nuts and seeds, and the latter had preserved bones of baboons presumably hunted by Homo erectus. " 1.8 million and 300,000 years ago
There's more here.


What about the late Paleolithic and Mesolithic?

"What evidence is known from the Klasies River Mouth caves? These South African coastal caves have a record dating from 120,000 to 60,000 years old, with flake tools from the Middle Stone Age (Africa uses this terminology instead of Paleolithic) and fancier blade and other tools from the Late Stone Age (equivalent of Upper Paleolithic; see pictures p. 104), as well as remains of terrestrial mammals and marine foods. There is disputed evidence for cannibalism and for use of plant foods around hearths. Modern-looking human skeletal remains appear very early here, about 100,000 years ago."
and
" What other evidence tells us about Upper Paleolithic lifestyles? Clearly people were hunting, butchering, and cooking food. The Pincevent site has many living floors with hearths, an area where the flintknapper apparently worked"
and
"During this time [the Mesolithic, between the Paleolithic and Neolithic] it appears that hunter-gatherer peoples expanded the diversity of species that they used and exploited smaller regions more intensively. There are more plant remains in general, but that may just be from better preservation, not necessarily an indication that Paleolithic meat-eaters were now getting a different diet with more fruits and vegetables! "
More here.

A great timeline of early and modern hominids

Plane Crazy

It is pretty ropey. Meat eating has been a major part of human diet long before that (before modern humans in fact).

the eveolution of dogs is an interesting one. The DNA evidence seems to point to a major break-away from wolves about 14K years ago. But it is confusing. Where did it occur. And why the relationship to European wolves if it didn't happen in Europe. How long were we hanging around with wolves before speciation occured?