Frydenborg - A dog in the cave: the wolves who made us human

The Pont dArc is a large natural bridge in the Ardeche district of southern France, a short distance from both Chauvet Cave and the town of Vallon-Pont-dArc. It has spanned the Ardeche River for about 500,000 years. Today a popular canoeing and kayaking destination for tourists, its usually described as the natural entrance to the Ardeche Canyon, and would have been a well-traveled path for the humans who inhabited the area as long as 32,000 years ago.

But hes not really alone. For next to the child strides a large, wolflike dog. Their footprints, fossilized in long-undisturbed mud of the cave floor, reveal that the boy is about eight or ten years old, four and a half feet tall. And the unusual animal by his side is easily as big as a wolf, with a paw the size of a grown mans hand. But those paw prints could have been left only by an animal that was neither a fully wild wolf nor a truly domesticated dog. Its an in-between beast we could call a wolf-dog.

The residue left behind by the childs torch rubbings tells us that the boy and his dog arrived at this back chamber of Chauvet Cave some twenty-six thousand years agomore than seventeen thousand years earlier than the previously accepted date of the earliest human domestication of gray wolves, the ancestors of all modern dogs. Yet there it is, unmistakable evidence that a dog walked there that long ago.

The boy and dog may have been the very last to enter this particular cave for thousands of years. Its entrance was blocked by a rock collapse soon after their visit, and it very likely remained sealed until 1994. That was when three local cavers happened upon it and, entering by way of an alternate entrance, discovered a hidden treasure that rocked the world.

A search dog named Ben leaps exhuberantly in a moment of play.

When first reported in 1994, the tracks of the wolf-like dog in Chauvet Cavefeaturing a shortened middle toe that only dogs, and not wolves, possesswere dismissed by most scientists. Evidence for the existence of such an animal in prehistory radically differed from the then-known fossil record, contradicting accepted theories of dog domestication. Before the Chauvet Cave discovery, most scientists dated the earliest domestication of dogs to about twelve thousand years ago, based largely on a 1977 archaeological find in northern Israel. There, buried under the floor of an ancient dwelling, lay the skeletons of an elderly human and a four-month-old puppy. The humans hand was found resting gently on the dogs chest. This was thought to be the earliest known evidence of the enduring domestic relationship between human and dog.

But 1977 is ancient history in the fast-moving field of dog science. New evidence is drastically reshaping how scientists understand the origins and shared history of human beings and dogs and is revealing a deeper and more complex connection between our two species than even the dog lovers among us had ever imagined. The more we learn about dogs, the more it appears that our species relationship with them may have begun as one of cooperation, rather than one of dominance and submissiona true partnership going all the way back to the earliest meetings of humans and certain rather unusual wolves.