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Mothering the Orphaned Pup: The Beginning of a Domestication Process in the Upper Palaeolithic

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Abstract

Several hypotheses have been proposed to explain the initial steps in the domestication process of the wolf. We discuss the human-initiated model in which wolf pups were brought to camp sites by male hunters and cared for by nursing women. A good relation between the more sociable and playful pups and the women and their children likely formed affiliative bonds and led to the survival of such pups into maturity. Some of these animals could have reproduced and delivered at least one litter. A selection on the behaviour of subsequent generations could ultimately have led to Palaeolithic dogs.

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Notes

  1. Although the ethnographic record indicates that women in several small-scale societies do hunt, hunting is primarily undertaken by men (Kelly 2013).

  2. Other mammals (e.g., deer, squirrels, rabbits) also require such stimulation (Gage and Duerr 2019).

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Acknowledgements

We thank Luis Pacheco-Cobos for inviting us to contribute to this special issue of Human Ecology on the ethnography and ethnoarchaeology of domesticated canines. We are grateful to the reviewers for their valuable comments that helped to improve our manuscript. We thank Ludomir R. Lozny for his help with the editing. We thank Tamara Janků for her help with Fig. 2.

Funding

Martina Lázničková-Galetová was supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic by institutional financing of long-term conceptual development of the research institution (the Moravian Museum, MK000094862). Mikhail Sablin was supported by the ZIN RAS (state assignment N° AAAA-A19-119032590102–7).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Operational Direction Earth and History of Life, Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences, Vautierstraat 29, 1000, Brussel, Belgium

    Mietje Germonpré

  2. Department of Morphology, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Ghent University, 9820, Merelbeke, Belgium

    Martine Van den Broeck

  3. Moravian Museum, Zelný trh 6, 65937, Brno, Czech Republic

    Martina Lázničková-Galetová

  4. Zoological Institute RAS, Universitetskaya nab. 1, 199034, Saint-Petersburg, Russia

    Mikhail V. Sablin

  5. Department of Geosciences and Senckenberg Centre for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment (HEP), Universität Tübingen, Hölderlinstrasse 12, 72074, Tübingen, Germany

    Hervé Bocherens

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Germonpré, M., Van den Broeck, M., Lázničková-Galetová, M. et al. Mothering the Orphaned Pup: The Beginning of a Domestication Process in the Upper Palaeolithic. Hum Ecol 49, 677–689 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10745-021-00234-z

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