Sometime in the last 100,000 years, a young female wolf found herself alone. She had been exiled from her pack by her mother because she became pregnant and was not the alpha female. If she had stayed with her pack, the older, more “dominant” female would have harassed her continually, finally pushing her aside and killing her puppies at birth; families can care for only one litter at a time. Wolves are the most monogamous of large mammals, and the young female needed to find a partner, or a new family, to help provide for her and the coming puppies. Her old family controlled the area, which discouraged or even prevented young male wolves other than her relatives from finding her and starting a new family group. Like all wolves, the young female was a highly social individual with a need for others, not just as protectors but to share her life.
She recalled a place where there were openings, suitable for a den, in the rock face above a small river valley. Her family had sometimes rested there on hot summer days. Arriving at the valley, she found that a group of humans had built a camp around the openings. Humans, who had arrived only recently, were also a social species, living in groups that seemed not unlike wolf families. They hunted maral (red deer) and bison; she had even seen them scavenging the kills of her family when they first arrived. Her desire for companionship was so strong that she approached the humans but stopped a safe distance away, sitting on her hindquarters, watching. One of them noticed her and gestured to the others. The humans made sounds, but they did not seem frightened or angry, so she moved to one small opening and slipped inside.
Over the next several passings of the sun across the sky, she explored, catching rabbits, grouse, and ground squirrels to feed herself. The humans ignored her for the most part, although their young ones often sat on a nearby rock, watching closely and even following her when she hunted. But they did not interfere or participate.
After another cycle of the moon, her belly was larger, making it more difficult to hunt. She became accustomed to the practices of the humans. They used more types of food than did wolves. Smaller, less hairy individuals that she assumed were females gathered plants and dug up roots; others snared rabbits and grouse. Larger, more hairy ones hunted large prey, usually from ambush; running only on their hind limbs, they were too slow to chase down hoofed animals, but they made a few kills, which fed the entire group.
One day male humans brought back the carcass of a maral hind. The young female wolf watched the females cut apart the carcass, using tools of stone. One younger, slender female pointed to where the female wolf sat in the entrance to her den and made sounds. Another, heavier female severed the neck and head from the carcass and handed them to the younger female, who walked toward the female wolf, whose entire body tensed. The human stopped about twenty paces from the den, laid the piece of the hind on the ground, and made a gesture like she was pulling toward the wolf. Then she returned to the butchering site to work on removing the legs.
The human’s action was outside the wolf’s experience. She was curious but cautious. Eventually, her hunger overcame her caution; she dragged the head and neck to her den and filled her belly for the first time in weeks. This was almost as good as having a male partner to provide for her.
After that, young human females regularly brought her food, sometimes a rabbit or a fish, enough so that she could rest and prepare for her birthing. They continued to feed her while she nursed her puppies, three females and one male. When the puppies grew teeth and could see, hear, and walk easily, they would leave the den. Young humans and even full-grown females would come to play with the puppies and feed them small bits of meat. It was as if they were all members of the same group.
As the puppies grew, they and their mother became comfortable enough with the humans to wander among them. Occasionally there would be conflict when a puppy tried to steal food meant for a human, but these squabbles were no worse than those that might arise within a wolf group. The humans quickly learned rudiments of wolf behavior from watching the mother wolf discipline her young ones and observing squabbles among the puppies themselves.
In the autumn, when the female began teaching her puppies how to hunt, young humans often joined them. Adult male humans watched this; then some began to participate in the lessons. The collaboration proved mutually beneficial: with wolves as hunting partners, humans could now run down swift prey, and humans reduced the risk of injury to the wolves by helping to finish the kill.
As the days grew shorter and the weather cooler, it was time for the humans to move to their winter camps in the lowlands. The mother wolf and her pups moved with them; they were now one group, living and hunting together. As the years passed, this combined two-legged and four-legged family became the most successful hunters in their lands. When the wolf pups grew old enough to leave their birth packs, they were free to do so—however, they did not fear the humans and in turn the humans did not fear them. Some young wolves joined other human groups, while others formed wolf families. They all shared the land and the herds with their two-legged and four-legged relatives.
This scenario is based upon thirty years of research experience watching wolves and their interactions with humans and with one another combined with careful studies of the traditions and attitudes toward nature of Indigenous peoples in North America (Pierotti 2011a, 2011b; Fogg, Howe, and Pierotti 2015), Australia, and central parts of Asia. Events similar to those described above happened in each of these places, probably occurring many times in some places over the last 40,000 years. Every time modern humans expanded their range into new habitats they found wolves already there (except in Australia; see chapter 6), willing to live alongside them. Many wolves served as teachers and companions (Schlesier 1987; Marshall 1995; Fogg, Howe, and Pierotti 2015).
The resulting scenario we describe does not involve humans “steal[ing] wolf pups from their mother’s den” or wolves acting as “scavengers on human waste dumps” (Coppinger and Coppinger 2001) or any other of the various models that have been suggested for the origin of one of the closest bonds between different species that has ever existed. This is almost certainly a coevolutionary relationship in which each species influenced the other (E. Russell 2011) to the point that eventually these two species evolved into contemporary humans and our closest nonhuman companions, the domesticated wolves that we now call dogs (see chapters 1 and 9). From our perspective, this coevolutionary relationship developed between two species that found one another compatible and was probably initiated by the wolves, to whom the humans eventually responded in a cooperative fashion. Each species recognized a skill set and emotional capacity in the other that would allow both to maximize their chances of survival and leaving more descendants.
— Brandy R. Fogg and Raymond Pierotti, The First Domestication: How Wolves and Humans Coevolved (2017)
