The Intimate Bond Read Online Free PDF Page A

without consuming it at once. Sometimes they would have watched the bird fall. At others, they would have listened for directions from the hunter, who would have stayed on shore as the dog swam into deeper water. The reward back at camp would have been, perhaps, a bird or parts of the quarry.
    All this is a hypothetical projection back over many thousands of years, but it gains traction when one considers the hunting weapons of the day. The Cro-Magnons and other Late Ice Age hunters used antler and bone-tipped spears, but their descendants adopted much lighterhunting weaponry that reflected both more forested landscapes and also the need to hunt birds and other small game over land and water. They developed lethal arrows tipped with small, razor-sharp stone arrowheads known to archaeologists as microliths (from the Greek
micros
, for “small”;
lithos
, for “stone”). Thousands of microliths have come from European hunting sites dating to between 10,000 and 6000 BCE . At a long-used hunting camp on the edge of a glacial lake at Star Carr in northeastern England dating to about 8500 BCE , the inhabitants hunted a wide variety of mammals, including red and roe deer, as well as waterfowl, including ducks. From this settlement has come a dog skull whose carbon isotope readings reveal a diet that may have included waterfowl, fish, mollusks, plant foods, and deer meat. 5 At Vedbaek, across the North Sea in Denmark, a well-known hunting site of 5300 to 4500 BCE , the inhabitants were highly efficient hunters who relied on a very broad array of game and plant foods, and on fish. Here again, microliths were commonplace. Two dog skulls come from the site, one found in a grave.
    Over many centuries, dogs became companions and hunting partners in a world of wetlands and forests. They were also guards, and some may even have carried or pulled loads, a common role for them in ancient North America, but there are no signs of this occurring as early as, say, ten thousand years ago. One should also note that dogs were sometimes themselves eaten. There are many instances from Danish hunting camps and other locations of dog bones being cracked open for marrow and skulls exhibiting chopping marks.
    The Ritual Dog
    Quite apart from companionship or partnership in the hunt, or even faithful service as a pack dog, dogs clearly had spiritual associations in many ancient societies—if burials are any guide. Such connections cannot be discerned in the mirror of the intangible after thousands of years, but we know that dogs had powerful mythic associations in Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt, and among the Romans and in Greek society. Hindus consider dogs as the guardians of Heaven and Hell.The Dominican order of monks has adopted a black-and-white dog as its symbol—in Latin,
domini canes
, “dogs and hounds of the Lord.” The Norse believed that a bloodstained watchdog named Garmr guarded the gates of Hell.
    As we have seen, dog burials began at least fourteen thousand years ago. The Bonn-Oberkassel dog lay in a double grave. At Ain Mallaha, in Israel, an immature dog or possibly a wolf puppy lay in an eleven-thousand-year-old grave of an older person, whose hand rested on the chest of the small beast. 6 Another Israeli site, at Hayonim Terrace, yielded two dogs buried with people between 9000 and 8500 BCE . Dog interments became positively commonplace in later times. At Skateholm, in Sweden, fourteen dogs lay interred in a cemetery, four of them lying with people; one, with a deliberately broken neck, placed atop the legs of a woman. Some dog burials lay with grave goods and were scattered with red ocher.
    Dogs arrived in the Americas with the first human settlers, some of the few domesticated animals available to the Native Americans. Their genetic diversity confirms that they didn’t originate there, but they acquired powerful ritual associations, reflected, once again, in deliberate burial. Examples abound, among