Wolves are said to hunt in cooperative packs, but that generalization
is not necessarily so. First, Farley Mowat (Never Cry Wolf, 1963) taught us that wolves in the Far North
of Canada and Alaska hunt singly when raising pups. Secondly, the coyote hunts
singly when raising pups and sometimes doubly as a mated pair, but also as a
family pack when pups are large enough to join their parents to learn how to
hunt. The latter assumes (as I do) that we accept the coyote as a subspecies of
the timber wolf because their hybrids are fertile.
Similarly, domesticated dogs are often said to hunt
singly, but that is also an over-generalization. Stray dogs are known to band up
and hunt in packs, attacking people and other animals. Furthermore, feral and stray female dogs take their young on
hunts.
It is commonly written that dogs evolved from wolves that
hung out at the edges of human camp-firelight. The idea is that the friendliest
and most cooperative wolves were favored by early hunter-gatherer humans,
creating a positive feedback mechanism that augmented natural lupine sociability.
However, suppose that early wolves were more like their
Far North siblings and lived in mated pairs. Then suppose that the early wolves
that found human subsidies irresistible were forced to become more sociable in
order to survive at the campfire perimeter. This is not an unreasonable
scenario for at least two reasons:
First, dogs have been called neotenic (immature) wolves
due to the dog’s physical and behavioral characteristics being very similar to those
of the young wolf.
Secondly, the fossil record does not obviously record ancient
dog and wolf behavior, so we do not know what either actually did. It is often said
that bones fossilize but behavior does not. However, at least some of the
consequences of behavior actually can be evident in fossilized bones. For example,
a research project (tinyurl.com/lgpw6du) evaluated injuries to the preserved bones of California dire wolves and
saber-toothed cats and found that wolves were more prone to head and neck injuries
whereas saber-tooths were more prone to spine and shoulder injuries. The researchers
then concluded that this was because dire wolves hunted in packs and attacked
large hooved ungulates from behind and thus were occasionally kicked in the
head and dragged by their prey like modern wolves. Saber-tooths, on the other hand, ambushed and then manipulated
prey with their powerful back and forelimbs into such positions that their long
teeth could deliver precisely aimed wounds to carotid and jugular blood
vessels. Another finding was that saber-tooths sustained more injuries, leading to the opinion that they attacked larger prey and did so alone.
Thus, some behavioral patterns can indeed be teased from old bones. Similarly,
research shows that food items can be deduced from tooth wear patterns, food
sources can be determined from element isotope ratios, migratory patterns can
be concluded from isotopes and wear patterns, and care for the injured and aged
can be demonstrated in nursed skeletons. It is only a matter of time before there
are enough skeletons and sufficient interest and funding to shed light on
ancient wolf and dog behavior.
Today, I read of an interesting paper (tinyurl.com/ybwf4pyn) in BBC News (tinyurl.com/y9lssctg) that expanded on
canine cooperativeness, which demonstrated that living wolves will cooperate
with each other more than dogs will. I was not really surprised at this finding.
I have read numerous technical reports on wolf-dog behavior in preparation for
the second book I started writing, so I already believed that young wolves and adult
dogs were less sophisticated socially than adult wolves. However, in reading this
research, I have for the first time been struck by a more radical set of questions.
Instead of dogs alone evolving toward a human-associated
existence and away from a lupine culture, is it possible that ALL wild wolves living
in close proximity to humans have evolved more sociability and that the dog and wolf are both evolving alongside and toward human acculturation? Are wolves more social now than before
humans evolved? Are wolves more social now than before dogs evolved? Is the Far
North wolf culture the primitive state and the wolf pack culture a derived
state? Did the wolf pack culture evolve as a consequence of single and doublet wolves gathering
around human campfires where they had no choice but to become more social? We know
that humans created the modern dog, but did we also create the modern wolf?
