Sharing meat scraps helped domestication of dogs in Ice Age winters, researchers say

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Historically, humans and wolves were both pack hunters and would compete for large prey, especially during leaner winter months. But while the two species could kill each other, humans tame wolves instead, whose offspring eventually became our dogs.

Researchers at the Finnish Food Authority, a division of the Ministry of Agriculture, hypothesized that in feeding leftover meat to wolves, Ice Age hunter-gatherers may have played a role in the early domestication of dogs. And they say they can explain for the first time why humans would tolerate the company of a competitive predator during this time.

Modern dogs are thought to have been domesticated by wolves, but exactly when is unclear – in 2017, a study published in the journal Nature Communications found that modern dogs were domesticated from a single population of wolves 20,000 to 40,000 years ago.

Still, the team of researchers from the Finnish Food Authority wanted to know how this “mutually beneficial” relationship came about, as humans and wolves would compete for food during the winter months.

By the end of the Ice Age, 11,000 years ago, at least five types of dogs existed

“People killed cave bears and saber-toothed cats to get rid of other carnivores,” Maria Lahtinen, senior scientist at the Finnish Food Authority, told CNN.

“People have not been able to explain why people tolerate competing carnivores in their habitats,” she said.

The researchers estimate how much energy would have been left over by humans from the meat of species they hunted for food, such as horses, moose and deer, between 14,000 and 29,000 years ago.

Their calculations showed that hunter-gatherers, not fully adapted to a carnivorous diet, had a surplus of lean meat during the winter months in Europe and Asia, which they could have shared with wolves.

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“During the late Palaeolithic period, the climate was such that most of Europe and Asia had winters,” Lahtinen, the study’s lead author, told CNN. “They were cold climatic regions, meaning that there were always, every year (there) conditions where people needed to have access to protein,” she explained.

“Humans are naturally adapted to carnivorous diets, but we can only include about 20% of the protein in our diet,” she said.

This excess meat could have been easily shared with wolves, the team says – a step toward a mutually beneficial relationship.

“After this initial period, novice dogs would have become docile and used in a variety of ways, such as hunting companions, pack animals and guards, as well as through many similar evolutionary changes to humans,” the authors wrote in the paper, published Thursday in the journal Scientific. Reports.

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