Go Ahead and Ask an Archeologist

Archeologists who make pronouncements about dogs and/or hunting, while knowing very little about either, are a personal irritation.  

A few days ago, I wrote a post about archeologists with uninformed thoughts about Mastodons and Clovis points.  

Today, let me turn to the bad habit archeologists have of looking at bones in a fire pit or cave and proclaiming they have found the first dog.  As I noted in an old post entitled The Wolf in the Dog House:

What are all these papers about that are proclaiming some scientist or another has just discovered "the first dog"?

Mostly, nonsense.

What is going on here, is that some underfunded and overlooked dirt scraper in some God-forsaken location has come across a canid skull in a cave.

That's it.

But, of course, there has to be more, and so measurements are taken, tests are run, and speculation runs rampant as people desperate for more funding look for a headline, a first, a discovery, a whole new way of looking at the world.

Carbon dating will be done, of course, and in the paper they will note the presence of a possible fire pit nearby, the bones of dozens of other animals, and maybe a few cut marks on a few bones. The scientists will measure the teeth and claim the animal they found has teeth ever so slightly different from some putative "norm" for wolves, and they may also say the muzzle was ever so slightly shorter than some other putative norm.

This "study" has been done again and again, all over the world, with only slightly different wording. So far scientists have boldly proclaimed that the first dogs came from China, the Middle East, France, Ethiopia, Oregon, and ... wherever.

It is all nonsense. They have no idea, and in fact the folks making these claims have no real understanding of wolves, dogs, species or even evolution. Hard to believe, but absolutely true.

Let's start with the basics: The differences between wolves, dogs, Coyotes, and Golden Jackals are so slight that they can ALL interbreed and produce fertile young.

So why circle back on this topic?

Well, it seems an animal rescue in Pennsylvania has been treating a mangy animal, and they cannot tell whether it's a dog or a coyote.

Wildlife Works in Mount Pleasant knows a bit about both animals, but damn if they can tell what the live animal in front of them actually is, so they are running DNA tests.

Me? I would just ask an archeologist.