By Rick Lamplugh
As wolves are slaughtered in Oregon and Washington and as wolf hunting season begins, it’s important to consider three views of how wolves were once our partners, not our enemies. Wolf-dogs may have helped our ancestors outcompete neanderthals. Wolves may have evolved into helpful dogs by training humans. Wolves became friends with our ancestors and showed them better ways to hunt. Each of the compelling views describes two species—humans and wolves—forming a partnership with both partners benefitting.
Wolves helped Homo sapiens outcompete Neanderthals
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| Photo by Rick Lamplugh |
The wolf we know today, Canis lupus, was evolving in Europe when the first Neanderthals appeared there about 250,000 years ago. When modern humans reached Europe about 45,000 years ago, they encountered Neanderthals who dominated that continent. Within 5,000 years of the arrival of modern humans, Neanderthals had disappeared. Wolf-dogs may have played a part in that disappearance.
“At that time, modern humans, Neanderthals and wolves were all top predators and competed to kill mammoths and other huge herbivores,” Anthropologist Pat Shipman told Robin McKie of The Guardian. Shipman, author of The Invaders: How Humans and Their Dogs Drove Neanderthals to Extinction, speculates that humans formed an alliance with wolf-dogs that doomed Neanderthals.
“Early wolf-dogs,” said Shipman, “would have tracked and harassed animals like elk and bison and would have hounded them until they tired. Then humans would have killed them with spears or bows and arrows.” In addition to helping with the hunt, wolf-dogs would have kept rival carnivores and scavengers from stealing the kill—just as wolves protect their kills today.
Both wolf-dogs and humans benefitted from this remarkable partnership. “…the dogs did not need to approach these large cornered animals to finish them off—often the most dangerous part of a hunt—while humans didn’t have to expend energy in tracking and wearing down prey. Dogs would have done that. Then we shared the meat. It was a win-win situation.”
Shipman told Simon Worrall of National Geographic that these ancient wolf-dogs were not the same as modern wolves or modern dogs, though they had similar characteristics. They were large, with big teeth and a great sense of smell. They could run long and fast. Like today’s wolves, they were built to hunt.
Shipman found no evidence that Neanderthals joined forces with wolves. As she told Worrall, “They continued to do things in the same old Neanderthal way as life got hard and times cold. They continued to hunt the same animals with the same tools in the same way. And that lack of adaptability may have been a telling failure as [modern humans] moved in. If you then add in wolf-dogs, Neanderthals were at a terrific disadvantage.”
Wolves may have evolved into dogs by training humans
Wolves may have evolved into dogs by training humans
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| Photo by NPS |
A second compelling view on partnering with wolves comes from Wolfgang Schleidt and Michael Shalter in their journal article, “Co-evolution of Humans and Canids.” The authors theorize that sometime after the last Ice Age, early humans stumbled upon wolves bringing down reindeer. The humans may have been as hungry as those wolves, but they couldn’t hunt as well. Stomachs growling, they puzzled over how to plunder some of their competitor’s bounty. Eventually humans partnered with wolves. Schleidt and Shalter believe that the first contacts between the two species were mutual and “subsequent changes in wolves and humans must be considered as a process of co-evolution.”
We evolved together as partners, and as centuries passed, the partnership led to wolves becoming dogs, Canis lupus familiaris. Schleidt and Shalter present an intriguing view of who trained whom: “…scavenging wolves took the initiative and conned the affluent hunting and gathering humans into sharing their plenty, by pretending to be their obedient servants and hunting companions.” In other words, wolves may have chosen and trained us, much to our benefit.
Wolves showed our ancestors better ways to hunt
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| Photo by Rick Lamplugh |
A third view on human-wolf partnership comes from Mark Derr in his book, How the Dog Became the Dog. Derr proposes that fifteen to twenty-thousand years ago nomadic hunters following game encountered a pack of wolves. The hunters and wolves did not fight or flee. Instead, some of those humans and wolves were right for one another, were both sociable and curious. Those wolves were capable of overcoming fear of a creature from another species and making what Derr calls “a leap of friendship.”
After that leap, our ancestors learned from wolves. They observed wolves hunting herds of prey and tried some of the predators’ tactics. The new approaches produced more meat than the hunters could consume or carry, and they left the excess. Wolves ate their fill and tasted how they could benefit from humans. Those hunters had begun the long process of domesticating Canis lupus into man’s best friend.
Derr’s image of two intelligent and resourceful creatures meeting on a trail, befriending one another, and evolving together places the wolf in a well-deserved positive light. Wolves that eventually became dogs were not, as the prevailing theory goes, rejects from their packs that slinked around in the shadows of the nomads’ campfires and begged for food. This distinction is important. Which would you respect and value more: an animal capable of making a leap of friendship or a reject begging for a handout?
What brought us to the war on wolves?
The war began when human hunters became herders. No longer a nomad with a limitless horizon, a herder’s territory shrank to the boundaries of a small patch of land. His family survived on what that patch produced. Any animal that ate the herder’s sheep, goats, pigs, or cattle took food from the family and reduced their chances of survival.
Those all-important patches of land were often in wolf territory, where wolves did what they still do best: pick the easiest prey possible. And, as today, wolves paid the price for our infringement onto their territory. The killing of livestock changed our relationship with Canis lupus for the worse. We were no longer two species partnering. We became two species competing. And wolves pay the price.
Indie author Rick Lamplugh writes to protect wildlife and preserve wildlands. His new book, Deep into Yellowstone: A Year’s Immersion in Grandeur and Controversy, is available signed from Rick, or unsigned on Amazon. His best seller, In the Temple of Wolves, is available signed, or unsigned on Amazon.
Comments
Tere’s an interresting response wolves have when they observe any animal with wideset eyes, eyes not place in a strong binocular position on the face/head. It appears that an adult wolf will make a determination that the animal may be prey when encountering for the first time such an animal.
Humans are distinctly binocular, whichh in our case is a primate trait. Even vegetarian primates appear to hhave the strong focused gaze tat hunting carnivores need for accurcy and success, although we are definitely omnivores, like pigs, for instance, who ave those opposed eyes.
Primates evolved this mimic due to needing accuracy for traveling in trees.
Wolves, by the way, have a vision field of about 240-260 degrees , and compared to our 180 or so, detect movement relatively behind themselves.
Herbivores, of course have a greater field.
It is somewhat less likely that Neandertals had wolf problems and sapiens used pet wolves on them, as the former had lived with wolves for half a million years, while the non-neandertals had only been exposed at best to the small Ethiopian and desert wolves, whose niche was more of a small-prey feeder. Even today, you will find an inordinate fear expressed by humans of strong African descent (We have to attribute the terror expressed by Euroamericans with guns as being due to cultural influence, and it is certainly not remotely universal. Again, gun ownership has repeatedly been shown over decades and decades of gun research, to be associated with vastly increased self-reported individuals’ fear of wolves and other carnivores).
I did not expect such fantasizing as I read by Lamplugh. Perhaps there is some bias toward attempting to shake looser this acquired European fear of wolves. It is certainly noot at all any more pervasive there than here.
We do know, however, that some polling of English schoolchildren in the past has shown fear and loathing of the wolf. When contrasted with schoolchildren of mainland Europe and North America, this terror is almost unique. It’s been attributed to absence of wolves from their nation and subjectivity to fantasy tales.
So, the article exhibits one of the major differences we’ve found between te brains of humans and other intelligences we live much more in our imagination, and even as adults, tend to believe in our private and ingroup ideations, rather than, like the wolf, in experience.
There are certainly significant developmental periods beyond which a species can far less easily learn, accept, and experiment with the new. Every species is to some extent, largely focused on conspecifics, pheromonally more subject to impulses that are of less tan conscious origin. I won’t go into this in comment here, but instead want to point out some other mistakes made by human observers:
THe low carriage of a wolf’s head has reason and value. Wile to the self-aggrandizing human mind, it can seem slinking or submissive, it is instead, favored because of the greater persistence of smells nearer to ground level. We have ourselves evolved away from strong ability to distinguish, categorize, and attend to smells and pheromones (hormones signaling others, rather than those signaling to the self), and thus have very limited sensory capacity, along with a tiny ability to communicate in this way, as wind and diffusion quickly reduce densities of the communicative molecules available at knee height!
If a wolf is signaling unwillingness to be aggressive, [s]he does so with drawn back ears and tail curled under. We often misattribute aggression to self-defense. Humans are socially prone to determine their relationships through aggression, while wolf pups raised normally as siblings, have quickly gotten this out of the way, and that’s why I used the term “unwillingness” rather than “submission” when I deal with wolf communications. In fights, just as do horses, drawn-back ears tend to protect these informatino-gatherers, the outer ears. A wolf may lower their ears while keeping them attuned to the aggressor, as well.
Anyway, the thrust of this comment is my intention to help you drop as much of your human fantasizing as you can. Wolves surely have recognized humans and neanderthal humans (for EVERY one of us not pureblood recent African, has from 1/50th to 1/25th or so Neanderthal blood. Neanderthals developed flutes and likely other musical instruments, good clothing, deep love and grief for their dead, and far more, including use of stone tools – that’s another discussion), as fellow intelligences. I have much more on this, but before thhe spanish missionaries “tamed” the Dine’, the Navajo, that tribe was known as a long-distance hunter, who would chase pronghorns over entire days , steadily outlasting them in stamina, until the four-legged would stop in complete exhaustion. This is in the historical record, just as you may ave seen the videos of San south Africans (when I saw that, I said, oh, humans used to do it here, too. You will have heard from other traditional keepers. I mention Dine’ because the pronghorn can run for miles at over 45 mph if kept stimulated. They were the most difficult prey outside of the mountain seep and goats, who mostly only die from [eagle] predation as kids).
So, now that you know a little more, go to the page where tribes assert their authority over their lands, and take special note of how they have settled down and decided to imitate the Euro wolf haters. Consider which path is better. The path of knowledge and relationship, or the path of hate and extinguishment of all who don’t please you.
Hetchitu yelo.
PS: Human eyes appear also to be evolved to catch shapes most easily below the level of the gaze. This helps us to follow sign (tracks, broken or different plants, faint paths) while keeping aware of both visible and probable things in the distance.
Wolf brains may not have this, as they are not really cognizant of visible tracks, and if you think about this, the variable nuances of minutes-old and hours or protected days old, make it difficult to learn. Human trackers often have to learn from their own tracks in different conditions.
Experimenting, I have noticed that even if ocean waves pass over tracks, the wolf can still discover by smell, and wen this occurs, will eagerly follow, as well as signal to any companion information about what or who is ahead. Small time differences between less and more recency seem to be easily detectable to wolf, who knows which way something passed without reference to track shape.
I’ve tested this and other stuff repeatedly,.
So wolves operate in ways sometimes pretty far different than humans with their human-sense-oriented intuition can understand.
Wolves do dream, and wake up with sudden new intents; this is a shared cognitive characteristic.
While they are attuned to their own expectations, they remain exquisitely observant, beyond the poor capacities of those humans who have abandoned their own birthright in favor of noise and diversion.
THe last comparison may have some value to those who study what’s known about Neanderthals. Their sensory and associative brains were larger than the sapiens, especially since the size drop we experienced in the last 10,000 years
(15 to 20% from our former. I have mentioned the excessive sapiens focus on imagined reciprocity, deception and self-deception elsewhere, if not on this site. THe portion of our brain neuroimaging as proven to be associated with nonfactual and contrafactual ideation and deception , was not so developed in Homo neandertalis. Thus those larger brains may have had even more room for complex orientation, mapping, discovery and long-term memory (which is diffuse in the brain)of large areas than do we. But that’s speculation, which can lead too easily to fallacy).
thrusting spears versus throwing tech were a difference, and certainly Neanderthals were less effectively aggressive because of this. Humans did not improve upon Mousterian stone tech for at least a hundred thousand years.
When that happened, is when we may pat our lil’ heads, always with the caution that it may have been just THERE that we overslopped the world, beginning to focus too much upon ourselves as “masters” of other life.
I remain Wolf’s, and appreciate those of you who do not elevate domesticity to superiority.
Wolves are not here for you. THey are each one, whole, complete, able to search for fulfillment for half a lifetime, unlike our poor, dependent species.
They have much to teach, as well as the ability to take wat is useful for their kind. This is why the toy gunners and wolf haters kill the naive, but have to go to great technological ends (like horses and guns and poisons and binoculars and careful baiting and airplanes and radiocollars and cameras, to know them to get them in human clutches.
Those tribes that fall to the Euro way will lose their wisdom, just as have those others who tempt and “train” them to be domestics.
I remind you once again, as I said to the woman who spurted to me “I WANT one!”, I said, his head is bigger than yours.
Do not speak of tolerance within your own kind, until you can tolerate the wolf, whose land this originally is.