Blog: Man's Best Friend - A History

Dogs are really are best friends: they played a significant role in our survival through the last ice age.   

The wolf (Canis lupus) has been around for 60 million years or more.    A survivor of the last ice age, the gray wolf, is linked genetically with Canis lupus familiaris (domestic dog).  

The gray wolf looks like a German Shepherd dog.  Ironically, man is the gray wolf’s biggest enemy. 

Human beings have been around a shorter time than have wolves.  The earliest known archeological evidence of our mtDNA and Ychromosome ancestors is found in East Africa.  

Paleoanthropologists found through DNA tests that we may have had a multi-regional origin.

The modified Out of Africa theory holds that around 400,000 years ago a population of hominids migrated northward through the Middle East and into Europe and parts of western Asia. 

Between 80,000 and 50,000 years ago another population from the ancestral continent journeyed into the Eurasian landmass, and the two populations met and mated. 

Early domestication of dogs may have occurred in East Asia, but archeological data shows the Middle East was the original location of domestication.

Mounting evidence suggests the First Americans arrived on this continent beginning at least 22,000 years ago.   Dogs accompanied them.

Stuart J. Fiedel, an archeologist at the Louis Berger Group in East Orange, New Jersey posits the First Americans traveled south after watching flocks of waterfowl head south in the fall and return in spring.  (“The First Americans,” Heather Pringle, November 2011 Scientific American, p. 45.)

Hunters in Siberia, Pringle states, domesticated wolves as early as 33,000 years ago.  “Fiedel thinks early dogs would have made invaluable hunting companions and pack animals…. In historic times, he notes, hunter-gatherers on the Great Plains placed pack saddles on dogs or hitched them to travoises to carry a variety of loads, from hides for bedding, and shelter to food stores…(A) study published in 1994 revealed that dogs carrying 13 kilograms of gear could travel as far as 27 kilometers a day, provided the temperature remained cool.  If starvation threatened, the migrants could have eaten some of their dogs.”

Dogs have been our partners for a very long time.   They sometimes made the ultimate sacrifice for us.  Go dogs!