Our devotion to dogs goes way back in time

The dogs buried in cemeteries around Lake Baikal 7,000 years ago were laid to rest by people who loved them.

Like the humans buried in nearby graves, the dogs were laid out in sleeping positions or sitting up. One dog wore a necklace with the same shiny, elk-tooth jewelry that humans wore. Their human companions put gifts into the dog graves for the afterlife.

As a boy, Robert Losey, who grew up on a western Kansas cattle ranch near Grinnell, had thought of dogs mostly as pets.

But as an archaeologist, he has helped excavate dog and human burial sites around Lake Baikal in southern Siberia and in other places around the world. He was struck by evidence he found of just how long humans have loved dogs. As friendships go, this one is ancient – and intense.

When dogs died near Lake Baikal, the human hunter-gatherers treated them as family.

“Like people when they died, they’d transport the dog long distances to these cemeteries,” Losey said in a phone interview from his office at the University of Alberta. “They’d put items on its body in the grave – spoons, necklaces, arrowheads, antlers from roe deer – the same grave goods they’d leave in the graves of humans.

“People had long lives with those dogs – the dogs we found were mostly older dogs, so they’d been with these people for years.”

They ate the same food. Chemical tests on dog and human bones showed both were eating a lot of fish. “Given that the dogs weren’t fishing, it means they were fed.”

Losey could tell from DNA and from dog skeletons that the Lake Baikal dogs were medium-sized, with yellow and white thick fur and heads shaped like modern Siberian huskies. “If you saw them walking down the street, you’d recognize them immediately as dogs and not wolves.”

They worked for their living, likely hauling sleds and guarding camps full of children and grandmothers from predators and rival bands of hunters. “But there was clearly also an emotional bond,” Losey said.

Birth of a friendship

It was wolves, and not humans, who started the friendship, he said.

At least 15,000 years ago, dogs were getting buried with humans. The canine skeletons were clearly dog and not wolf bones, he said.

And before that?

“Maybe 30,000 years ago was when it started,” he said. Wolves began hanging around the camps of human hunters, eating scraps. Eventually, over thousands of years, wolves with perhaps more stress tolerance than other wolves would stop running away from the scrap heaps when humans came near them.

They paired up to hunt together at first, then, eventually, to enjoy each other’s company.

They’ve stuck together since.

Dogs have helped shape our evolution and aid our successes.

“It would have been impossible for humans to colonize the Arctic as fast and as early as they did had there not been dogs with them,” Losey said.

We shaped their evolution, also – and not always for the better. Nearly all the dog breeds we see today, from the bug-eyed pug to the Mexican hairless to the teacup Yorkies, were breeds created by humans, mostly for vanity’s sake, in the past 200 years. That process meant repeatedly interbreeding dogs, which meant that health challenges and infirmities such as hip problems became prominent in some breeds.

And yet they forgive us.

“Dogs have evolved this remarkable ability over thousands of years to become really good at being with us” Losey said. “We can’t even speak with one another as people sometimes, but we can always communicate with them. They can understand when we are suffering, when we are happy or sad. They have this capacity to want to please people.

“Dogs have character traits we want to have in ourselves. They can be beautiful, athletic, loyal, loving, forgiving and affectionate.

“People sometimes find that other people lack those things.”

This story was originally published April 2, 2017 at 3:28 PM with the headline "Our devotion to dogs goes way back in time."