Dogs are very interesting for archaeologists. They were the first animal to be domesticated, and even predated the domestication of any plants. One of the biggest issues in archaeology is why people began domesticating animals and plants. Without domestication, we would still be living as hunters and gatherers. Civilizations as we know them would not have developed. It is usually assumed by most archaeologists that animals and plants were domesticated because people needed more food due to increasing populations or other factors.
However, there is a major disconnect between this idea and the domestication of dogs since virtually no one has suggested that dogs were domesticated for food. Virtually everyone agrees that dogs were domesticated for social purposes–as pets, or for other social purposes. If the desire to keep pets was the major factor, one wonders why it took over 2 million years to develop the desire for pets. What other factors might be involved? Why did dogs only start becoming domesticated in the last 10,000-30,000 years? What had changed in society?
First of all, it is important to recognized that keeping dogs is and was expensive. As Karen Lupo has shown for hunter/gatherers, dogs need to be fed at least for part if not all of their needs. On the Northwest Coast and in Alaska, dogs were typically fed about 1 kilogram of fish per day. This meant that a family maintaining just one dog had to produce an extra 365 kg. of fish (or meat) per year. This was a high cost for simply maintaining a pet that few poor families could afford. Only rich families that produced surpluses could therefore afford to keep dogs whether for work, defense, or simply pleasure and prestige.
Secondly, there is considerable ethnographic information that complex hunter/gatherers kept a wide range of animals as prestige displays, including eagles, hawks, crows, turkeys, marmots, racoons, coyotes, deer, moose, bison, and even bears, not to mention wolves which were later bred to make dogs. Part of the role of dogs may have also been to protect their owners from attacks or theft. But the prestige role of dogs has continued until the present for the rich, with special breeds costing very large amounts of money as well as their veterinary maintenance of good health. Even the Roman elites paid large sums of money to Celtic tribes for special breeds of dogs. I am suggesting that this role of dogs has not changed from the beginning. In fact, I have argued that all animals were originally domesticated for social purposes that typify complex hunter/gatherers. These purposes include the use of animals like sheep, pigs, and cattle raised and used for feasts (involving debts), marriages, lavish funerals, and political alliances. Domestic animals in tribal societies today are raised with surplus plant foods with the intention of using them as kinds of investments, much like people use surplus income to invest in the stock market (originally the market for “stock” i.e., cattle).
Thirdly, early dogs first appear among complex hunter/gatherers like the Natufians of the Near East and the Upper Paleolithic groups of Eurasia. The earliest evidence of dogs comes from work by Meitje Germonpré on Eurasian dogs 32,000 years ago. The skulls of these dogs can be distinguished from wild wolves due to the shortening and broadening of the snout, a broader braincase, and overall smaller size of the skull. Complex hunter/gatherers provide the ideal context for domesticating dogs because for the first time in the evolution of humans and their cultures, there are regular surpluses of food, feasting involving debts, the accumulation of wealth, competition between individuals or groups for wealth and power, socioeconomic inequalities, and needs to display success or prestige. Dogs were certainly pets, but they were also so much more. They are mentioned specifically in my young reader story of life in the Ice Age (The Eyes of the Leopard) together with the keeping of ferrets as a key feature of the complex hunting and gathering societies that I think existed at that time.
