Dog domestication may have helped humans thrive while Neandertals declined

[Ichingcarpenter]

BIG SNIP.....




Earning Their Keep
Would a good dog really have been so important that it would inspire ritual significance—and give modern humans a crucial edge over Neandertals? We can’t observe how ancient, but anatomically modern, humans used dogs in their daily life, but there are some interesting possibilities. We know from their bones that the Paleolithic dogs were very large, with a body mass of at least 32 kilograms and a shoulder height of at least 61 centimeters, about the size of a modern German shepherd. Germonpré and her colleagues suggest that these early dogs might have been beasts of burden. They cite ethnographic examples of peoples like the Blackfeet and Hidatsa of the American West, who bred very large, strong dogs specifically for hauling travois or strapped-on packs.

All but one of the six Paleolithic dog sites that have so far been identified preserve large quantities of mammoth bone which, with meat attached, must have been lugged from the kill site to where the group was living. If the dogs carried the meat, humans would have saved a lot of energy, so each kill would have provided a greater net gain in food—even after feeding the dogs. Additional food generally has marked effects on the health of a group. Better-fed females can have more babies, can provide them with more milk and can have babies at shorter intervals. Before long, using pack dogs could have caused the human population to increase.

Dogs may also have contributed more directly to human hunting success. To discover how big a difference dogs could make, Vesa Ruusila and Mauri Pesonen of the Finnish Game and Fisheries Institute investigated what may be the closest easily studied analog to a mammoth hunt: the Finnish moose hunt. Finns use large dogs such as Norwegian elkhounds or Finnish spitzes to find moose and keep them in place by barking until humans can approach and shoot them. In hunting groups of fewer than 10 people, the average carcass weight per hunter without dogs was 8.4 kilograms per day. With dogs, the yield went up to 13.1 kilograms per hunter per day—an increase of 56 percent.

Studies of modern hunting peoples who use smaller dogs and pursue smaller game also indicate the advantages of working with dogs. Jeremy Koster and Ken Tankersley of the University of Cincinnati studied hunting among the Mayangna and Miskito peoples in Nicaragua. About 85 percent of the mammals taken by the villagers involved the use of dogs. Male dogs—which were larger—brought in more game than females. Male dogs contributed, on average, to the capture of more than 20 kilograms of meat each month, and the most successful of those dogs helped land more than 100 kilograms per month. The most proficient female brought in more than 35 kilograms per month. These dogs weighed, on average, 11 to 12 kilograms, and yet some contributed much more than their body weight in meat each month.


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http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/id.15294,y.0,no.,content.true,page.1,css.print/issue.aspx

[bluedigger]

1. This is really interesting.

I hadn't realized that they were pushing back the dates for the domestication of dogs so far. The implications are fascinating.