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pile of arrows lies to his right, ready for use. He watches the geese as they rest on the placid waters of the shallow lake after their arduous journey from the south. Feet in the mud, he remains motionless, waiting for some geese to swim within arrow’s range. To his right, his black-and-brown hunting dog lies quietly, and completely still, panting gently, alert. Half a dozen ducks paddle slowly close to shore. Slowly, deliberately, the man draws his bow and takes aim. The dog remains absolutely still, watching intently. Zip, zip . . . the hunter releases once, grabs another arrow and shoots again. The startled birds take to the air, but two struggle in the water, impaled by razor-sharp flint-tipped arrows. A soft command: the dog points, then slips into the water. He swims to the struggling fowl, grabs them one by one, and carries them to shore. The hunter quickly wrings their necks and puts them in a netting bag. His dog wags his tail and looks up expectantly. A pat on the head, and maybe a scrap of food, then back to the hunt as the hunter moves slowly to a new vantage point in quest of more prey. Hours later, dog and master return to camp, the last bird gripped firmly in canine jaws.
    As we have seen, wolves and humans got together in many locations, some bitterly cold, others much warmer. Despite the growing, if incomplete, evidence for wolf-dogs, we still do not know precisely when people fully tamed canines. One certainly could not describe wolf-dogs as fully domesticated—if they existed at all.
    What evidence do we have for actual dogs? The earliest unquestionable dog came to light in the grave of a fifty-year-old man and a twenty- to twenty-five-year-old woman unearthed at Bonn-Oberkassel, Germany, by quarrymen’s picks in 1914. 1 The quarrymen shattered most of the bones before archaeologists investigated the burial with methods that were extremely crude by modern standards. Unfortunately, only a jaw fragment of the fourteen-thousand-year-old beast survives.
    When I excavate a burial, I always wonder what events surrounded the interment, whether animal or human. Did the deceased perish from old age, from chronic disease, or a war wound? Was he loved or held in contempt? Did she have children and what rituals surrounded her passing? Many of these questions can be teased from the bones (from telltale signs of injuries caused by hard work, or of serious infections), and from DNA. The Bonn-Oberkassel burial is particularly fascinating, because the earliest-known dog in the world lay with two people, perhaps its master and mistress.
    At fourteen thousand years ago, the Bonn-Oberkassel beast is a very ancient dog indeed. But was it a dog or its close wild relative, a wolf? Distinguishing dogs from wolves is notoriously difficult, especially when the surviving bones are fragmentary, as they usually are. Domestic dogs are generally smaller. Their teeth and skulls display minor differences from those of wolves. To tell the two apart is challenging at best, so the experts have turned to a statistical tool known as discriminant function analysis. The researchers have designed a classifier that combines measurements from the bones from known wolves and domesticated dogs to produce spreads of measurements around an average, so that a jaw such as that from Bonn-Oberkassel can be compared with the averages for both wild and domestic canids. Zooarchaeologist Norbert Benecke compared the Oberkassel jaw with other archaeological finds and with bones from Greenland wolves and specimens from zoos, even from Australian dingoes. He found that it belonged firmly in the dog category, making this find—alas, sadly incomplete after the passage of a century—the earliest-known domestic dog yet known. 2
    Is Oberkassel the earliest dog in the world? Certainly not, for the changeover took hold in many locations at a time when majorenvironmental changes caused by rapid warming at the end of the Ice Age were under way. At