by Brian Fagan
Migratory species such as caribou and reindeer have been favored prey for thousands of years in the north during and since the Late Ice Age. They still are today, for basic hunting practices have changed little, even if the weaponry is radically different. Both migrate in large herds, the routes and strategic river crossing points relatively predictable. One might assume that the hunters followed the marching herds and harvested whatever beasts they needed. This conventional assumption is completely wrong, for reindeer move much faster than humans, unencumbered as they are by children and personal possessions. Much caribou or reindeer hunting involved, and still involves, ambushing and trapping them at strategic locations, especially in late summer and early fall, when the beasts are in prime condition. Far more is at stake than merely meat, for the hunter requires an equal amount of fat, making fat-bearing animals in prime condition a favored target, especially bucks in the fall, who may carry up to 20 percent of their weight in fat ahead of rutting season. Many northern hunting groups today would kill beasts for their fat, then abandon the carcasses to rot, except for the tongue and the marrow from lower leg bones, prized delicacies. Much of the year, does and fawns are preferred, while unborn fawns are much enjoyed—much to the consternation of today’s conservationists. The same practices were probably followed in ancient times.
Then there are the hides, which serve all kinds of uses—fawn skins for underwear, buckskins for boots, for example. This is apart from the hides used for thongs, tents, bags, kayaks, and other purposes. Back in 1771, the naturalist Samuel Hearne estimated that every Chipewyan individual near Hudson’s Bay consumed more than twenty caribou hides a year for domestic purposes alone.11 Again, there was huge wastage of meat, which was left to rot in the warm temperatures of late summer. These abandoned carcasses were a boon for scavengers such as ravens and wolves, both of whom followed reindeer herds throughout much of the year. The wastage was enormous, but not enough alone to cause the extinction of reindeer or caribou herds. Wastage was, however, inevitable, when opportunism, careful observation, and only partial consumption of the prey worked well enough to ensure survival. Success depended on weighing the many factors such as temperature, snow depth, and snow hardness, so that changing migration routes could be fathomed ahead of time. The alternative was starvation.
In small hunting groups, the leaders were individuals with more than average strength, endurance, and hunting expertise, and who had the ability to gauge communal opinion and translate it into action. As a leader accumulated meat and other goods from his hunting skills, he redistributed his “wealth” to others in the band. There was no such thing as individual wealth, in the sense that there is with domesticated animals, where each owner seeks more beasts for him or herself. Leadership was ephemeral, and passed from one hunter to another in societies where the prey’s reproduction lay in the hands of supernatural forces.12 Power over the supernatural, often in the hands of a specialist shaman, was all-important in societies where herds ensured the survival of humans. Contrast this with societies with domesticated animals, where people were or are responsible for perpetuating their herds.
To many hunters, the animals made themselves available at the whim of a supernatural power, a spiritual master who decided which animals would be provided for human consumption and then regenerated. This is why hunters treated killed animals with respect—to avoid offending the spirits. To northern peoples, the reindeer and caribou were immortal, unconquerable. In a real sense, to ancient and living hunters, such as the San and the northern hunter, killing game is an act of renewal. As the flesh and hides are respectfully consumed or used, the soul of the dead beast is released to its spiritual master.
Following the Honeyguide
There are numerous examples of close interactions between wild animals and humans, which are certainly not domestication. They are loosely formed alliances of benefit to both sides, often inconspicuous and perpetuated for generations, such as that between the Boran cattle herders of northern Kenya and the honeyguide bird (see sidebar “Honeyguides and Humans”). The honeyguide locates bees’ nests; the Boran open them. Such is the interdependency between the Boran and the honeyguide that the people consider killing one an act of murder.
Honeyguides and Humans
The greater honeyguide, Indicator indicator, loves beeswax and other components of the honeycomb.13 It is one of the few birds that can digest wax, but it has a problem. While it can locate nests, it’s unable to open them, located as they are in narrow crevices, tree hollows, and termite mounds. Also, the restricted entrances are protected by aggressive bees, whose stings can penetrate honeyguide feathers, with fatal results. The birds devour wax in times when insects are rare, at the end of the dry season—a moment when the Boran, too, are short of food and milk and turn to honey. The Boran also consider the bee a superb pharmacist, its honey a treatment for a wide range of human diseases, among them malaria and pneumonia, this quite apart from its nutritional value, especially when mixed with fresh cattle blood or milk. But humans have a problem, too. They can break open nests and remove the honey, but they have trouble locating them. For hundreds, probably thousands, of years, therefore, honeyguides and humans have worked together to obtain honey.
Figure 1.2 The Greater Honeyguide, Indicator indicator. © Morphart/ Fotolia.
When hunting for nests, a man blows air into his clasped fists, shells, or hollowed-out nuts. The penetrating whistle sound can be heard over distances of several kilometers. Sometimes the hunter lights a smoky fire, knocks against wood, or shouts to attract the birds. By the same token, the honeyguides seek out human partners. They fly close to the hunter, perch on conspicuous bushes or trees and make a tirr-tirr call. As the man approaches, the bird increases the tempo of the call and flies toward the bee colony. The honeyguide flies from one perch to another, in a more or less straight line, until it reaches the nest, then falls silent as the hunter begins his final search. Everyone who collects honey leaves some of the comb for the birds. No one knows how this unique closeness developed, but the guiding season coincides with the time when both birds and humans are short of their normal staple diets, and they rely on one another to find food in this unique form of symbiosis. The partnerships is also a function of mobility—constant movements of cattle herders, the migratory habits of the bees, and the broad range of the honeyguide. The avian guides save the hunters huge amounts of time and increase their success rate significantly.
In legend and folklore, animals were active players in the drama of creation and in the endless unfolding of daily life. These stories, like the experience of the hunt, passed by word of mouth, through tale, chant, ceremony, and dance, and hard experience from one generation to the next, a priceless archive of knowledge about animals when people lived in close intimacy with their prey. All this changed as animals reshaped human society.
Wolves and People
CHAPTER 2
Curious Neighbors and Wolf-dogs
Central Europe, a summer night eighteen thousand years ago. The Cro-Magnon hunters and their families eat by the light of the flames around a campfire. They throw discarded reindeer bones into the intense darkness without, perhaps an open space or the slope below a natural rocky overhang. As the flames leap higher, the band sees flickers from the wolf eyes that observe them from nearby. Everyone knows the beasts are there, waiting patiently until the people settle down for the night. Sometime later, the families wrap themselves in reindeer hides and drift into deep sleep. Quietly, the hungry wolves grab the discarded bones and carry them away, but the families are unafraid. They have no fear that the wolves will consider them prey, for the pack has stayed close to the band and lived off its discards for generations. Even children know individual animals by sight. Both humans and beasts behave unthreateningly, predictably, both social animals who rely on one another in inconspicuous ways.
At some point, after centuries of juxtaposition in bitterly cold landscapes, and also in warmer climates, in all manner of places,
some wolves joined humans and evolved into dogs. Quite why they did so, and when, is a matter of ongoing debate, but we know that it happened long before we became farmers, settled in permanent villages, and herded farm animals, probably well before fifteen thousand years ago.
All the experts agree that the Eurasian gray wolf (Canis lupus) was the ultimate ancestor of domestic dogs. Genetics tell the tale.1 The mitochondrial DNA of dogs, inherited through females, differs at the most by a mere 2 percent from that of wolves, whereas that of their closest wild relative, the coyote, shows a 4 percent difference (see sidebar “Dogs, Wolves, and DNA”). It may well be more complicated than that, for interfertility between canids is commonplace, which would make for a more diverse ancestry.2
Fifteen millennia in the past, the world was in the final grip of the Ice Age. Enormous ice sheets mantled Scandinavia and much of North America; global sea levels were about ninety-one meters (three hundred feet) lower than today. A vast expanse of open, treeless steppe extended from the Atlantic deep into Siberia; an intensely frigid, windy land bridge linked Northeast Asia and Alaska. Nine-month winters were the norm, Europe and Eurasia home to a remarkable bestiary of cold-adapted mammals, among them aurochs (the primordial ox), bison, reindeer, and wild horses. Predators large and small abounded, among them the gray wolf and human beings, both of whom preyed on animals of all kinds. The humans were adept, ingenious hunters, popularly known as Cro-Magnons, named after a rock shelter in southwestern France where they first came to light in 1868.3 They first settled in small numbers throughout Europe about forty-three thousand years ago. For tens of thousands of years, wolves and people shared a challenging environment, not necessarily competing, but each closely observing the other, often at surprisingly close quarters. This juxtaposition led to profound changes in the relationship between them.
Big Bad Wolves?
Wolves receive consistently bad press, which goes back a long way, probably because they killed cattle and sheep. They are ravening, fierce killers. They decimate sheep in their pens, attack children, and haunt dark forests on the margins of small villages. The fictional Big Bad Wolf is an enduring stereotype, with deep roots in medieval folklore. In Norse mythology, Skoll the wolf swallows the sun when the world perishes in Ragnarök, a cataclysm of violent battle and natural disasters. Big Bad Wolf has become a menacing antagonist, a generic cautionary tale, even featured in Disney movies and on Sesame Street (where he repented of his sins and took up a hobby: blowing bubbles).4 In fact, we now know that many individual wolves are timid and even friendly, as well as being intensely curious.
Bad press went hand in hand with wholesale slaughter. Fifteen thousand years ago we lived alongside wolves in what must have been a state of cautious but easy familiarity. In some places, they must have been as commonplace a sight as people walking dogs on city streets today. Once we became farmers, however, we turned on our predator neighbors, to protect our stock when the wolf’s traditional wild prey became scarce. As herds and flocks proliferated and people settled in more crowded landscapes, they eradicated wolves whenever they could. Rulers and governments joined the fray. As long ago as the sixth century BCE the Athenian lawmaker Solon offered a bounty for every wolf that was killed. Wolves eventually influenced religious doctrine. Christian symbolism depicted the wolf as the devil, the evil being that pursued and suborned the living faithful. To protect flocks and herds, European kings paid bounties for wolves. Wolf packs were extinct in England by the end of King Henry VII’s reign in 1509, hunted and trapped relentlessly as sheep killers. The vendetta crossed the Atlantic. By 1930, there were virtually no wolves left in the United States’ Lower Forty-Eight and none in the West. Yet gray wolves remain the most widespread large mammals on earth after people and their livestock, although they now occupy but a third of their ancient range. Fortunately, generations of research have taught us a great deal about them and their impact on the landscape.
More on a Social Predator
Gray wolves somewhat resemble German shepherds, but with larger heads, longer legs, and bigger paws. They are slender, powerfully built animals that move swiftly, their long legs allowing them to navigate through the deep snow that falls over much of their range. Wolves have no enemies except humans and, in the Russian Far East, Siberian tigers. After humans and lions, they were once the world’s most widely distributed mammals, accustomed to living alongside people, with whom they shared common prey.
Like humans, wolves are social animals, which live in close-knit packs. Most groups consist of two parents and their offspring, with occasionally a sibling or some other individuals.5 There’s a strong dominance hierarchy in wolf packs, the two top-ranking beasts being the breeding pair. Subordinate, mature animals are subservient to them, but these usually disperse from their natal group and form their own breeding packs. The hierarchy changes constantly, dominance and submission being measured by body postures such as the position of the ears or tail. The packs are constantly on the move, usually traveling in single file. They can cover long distances when following in the tracks of game such as migrating caribou. When hunting, they rely on their acute sense of smell, which is said to allow them to locate a moose and its young over 7 kilometers (4.5 miles) away. They approach their prey silently, cautiously, and rapidly, chasing it at full speed, hoping to run it down within a short distance. Experts say that only about 10 percent of wolf hunts are successful, largely because animals such as moose and musk ox can defend themselves effectively while standing at bay. By contrast, caribou, deer, and reindeer rely on their speed to escape. The actual attacks involve the pack surrounding their prey and biting at it to bring it down. The wolves immediately start eating the dead beast, consuming as much as they can to compensate for long periods without food. Wolves are often scavengers, for they prey on older animals and young beasts and fawns, especially at times when their prey is weak and poorly nourished after a long winter.
Wolves are some of the most social of all predators. Such behavior may have originated with their adaptation to cooperative hunting of large ungulates such as bison or reindeer during the Ice Age, especially during the actual kill. In so doing, they behaved just like very early humans, who combined opportunism with scavenging. At first wolves were more successful than people, whose weapons were little more than fire-hardened or stone-tipped spears, at being able to get as close to the prey as possible. Judging from injuries found on Neanderthal skeletons, the hunters of fifty thousand years ago sometimes physically jumped onto the backs of larger animals to drive a spear into their hearts. There are analogies with wolves here, who rely on fast pursuit, then attack at close quarters.
With the appearance of Homo sapiens, modern people, in tropical Africa some one hundred fifty thousand years ago, the competitive gap between wolves and humans narrowed because of the gradually improving technology used by human hunters—the antler-tipped spear propelled by a spear thrower, which increased range and accuracy, then the bow and poisoned arrows. By thirty thousand years ago, humans and wolves were close neighbors in European and Eurasian landscapes. Both lived in tightly structured groups; both wolves and people raised their young as part of a small community. On many occasions, hunters and wolves may even have hunted together, in situations where both sides were familiar with, and not afraid of, one another.
If their cave paintings are any guide, hunters of thirty thousand years ago respected their prey and fellow predators. Wolves never appear in their rock art, but they were so commonplace that people must have respected their close neighbors and incorporated them both into their hunting lore and into mythic tales as important actors in the drama of cosmic origins. This is, of course, merely an assumption, but it has solid foundations in the ways in which modern northern hunters treat wolves. The Nunamiut Eskimos of Alaska admire wolves’ hunting expertise when attacking caribou. Inuit hunters in the Arctic thought of them as guides, even as animals that were once people—and hence as brothers. But there were also tales of dangerous wolves, evil
forces at creation. For the most part, the relationship between people and wolf was one of respect on the human side and, on occasion, of curiosity on the other. There were also advantages for both sides.
In the predator-rich landscapes of the Late Ice Age, wolves would have been commonplace, familiar beasts. Their human neighbors would have known, for example, that wolf packs move constantly in search of quarry except during the denning season of spring and early summer.6 They would have been aware of the strategic locations where packs would track and hunt down migrating reindeer—often the very same places where humans ambushed the massed beasts. Both were intensely social animals accustomed to opportunism and scavenging, even from one another’s kills. It would have been an easy step for wolves to scavenge discarded bones and meat from human kills carried back to hunting camps. Over the centuries, such scavenging would have become second nature, bringing human and beast into ever-closer juxtaposition. The wolves took advantage of human tolerance in supplying them with food. Both humans and wolves were accustomed to cooperation, cooperation in the hunt, in observing their surroundings, and in social relationships. Years of scavenging could have led to an easy familiarity, even to situations where some more sociable wolves lay close to feeding hunters, signaling, perhaps with their eyes or other gestures, that they wanted the leftovers. In time, too, one can imagine hunters and these same wolves tracking reindeer herds, the wolves acting as guides, perhaps surrounding the quarry, and the hunters, with their efficient weaponry, acting as the killers. A few wolves, or entire packs, may have associated themselves with hunting bands, perhaps warning against other predators, scouting game, scavenging meat. There would have been advantages on either side: more reliable food supplies for the wolves, a measure of protection and intelligence for the hunters.
