The Intimate Bond Read Online Free Page B

took thetrouble to inter it with those who were presumably its owners. At the moment, this is the earliest dog burial known, but more important, it is the first in a tradition of dog burials that survived through thousands of years in different societies, whether those of hunters or farmers.
    After the Ice Age
    It may be no coincidence that the first domesticated dogs appear at a time when the grip of the last Ice Age cold snap was loosening. Within a few thousand years, rapid warming and environmental shifts had wrought profound changes in hunting societies over huge tracts of the world, from western and northern Europe, across Eurasia, and into Southwest Asia. Natural global warming rapidly shrank the great ice sheets that mantled Scandinavia, the Alps, and what is now Canada. Sea levels rose, continental shelves vanished under the ocean, and temperatures climbed. The northern world changed profoundly as ice sheets and open steppe retreated northward and gave way to more closed-in woodland and forest.
    Thousands of hunters and foragers adjusted to these environmental changes in various ways. Some hunting bands moved northward from sheltered valleys in southwestern France and northern Spain and into the more open terrain of areas such as the Paris Basin and northern Germany, where they continued to hunt reindeer and other Ice Age animals, as they had always done. 4 Others moved to newly exposed coasts and to lakes formed by the retreating ice and became fisher folk and fowlers. Many groups stayed where they were and adapted to lives where wild plant food became as important as game. The prey they hunted was no longer reindeer and other cold-loving animals, but red deer and other forest beasts, taken by patient stalking and with bow and arrow. In a changing world where solitary prey, birds on the wing, and waterfowl assumed great importance, the dog came into its own and became far more than a companion—this at a time when no one cultivated the soil or herded animals. For the first time, it served as a true hunting partner in ways that overcame the limitations and size of the human hunter.
    In an era of smaller, more elusive game, the dog’s matchless sense of smell and silent tracking abilities paid rich dividends when the hunter was pursuing forest deer or small rodents. A well-trained hunting dog could flush waterfowl and recover shot prey from lakes and rivers. Today, there are numerous breeds of “hunting dogs” (among them hounds, retrievers, and terriers) or gun dogs. Some dogs track game by their scent. “Sight hounds” are breeds, such as whippets, that have acute sight and can run fast. They course prey from a distance, pursue, and kill it. Spaniels are adept at flushing out game for a hunter, while terriers are skilled at locating dens and capturing bolting inhabitants. Retrievers are excellent swimmers, which makes them ideal for retrieving waterfowl as well as birds on land. All these breeds, and many others, result from selective breeding by their owners.
    There were, of course, none of these breeds twelve to fifteen thousand years ago, but constant association with hunters and patient training, almost certainly using rewards, would have adapted dogs into a useful tool for the hunt. The key word may be
companion
, for it seems unlikely that dogs did much of the killing. A hunter would have known his dog intimately and as well as, if not better than, his quarry. He would have recognized the telltale signs when the dog sensed a deer or some other hidden quarry, even a bear. However, in a world where more and more food came from birds of all kinds, especially waterfowl, dogs would have been invaluable for retrieving kills made among dense thickets or on the water. The hunters must have trained their dogs to remain under control, to wait quietly when sent to retrieve. Animals with “soft mouths,” who were willing to please and obey, would have been ideal for retrieving game unharmed,