And I Bet She Was a Good Dog Too

Because cave men probably wouldn't have tolerated a bad one. Science Alert, Oldest Dog DNA Ever Found Reveals How Ancient Our Friendship Really Is

The discovery of the oldest ever dog DNA suggests they have been our best friends for nearly 16,000 years – 5,000 years earlier than had previously been thought, new research said Wednesday.

Despite being ubiquitous in the homes, backyards and hearts of people across the world, surprisingly little is known about where dogs come from. "It's just an interesting mystery," Swedish geneticist Pontus Skoglund of the UK's Francis Crick Institute told reporters.

Dogs are most likely a mix of two types of grey wolves, he said. However exactly when dogs diverged from wolves has been difficult to trace, partly because their ancient bones are tricky to tell apart. That is why scientists behind two new studies published in the journal Nature sequenced the genomes from archaeological remains, shedding light on the elusive origins of our furry friends.

 

The first study revealed that the world's oldest canine DNA was discovered in a piece of a skull in Pinarbasi in what is now Turkey.Artistic reconstruction of Pınarbaşı c. 15,800 years ago, based on evidence from archaeological excavations by University of Liverpool. (Kathryn Killackey)

The female puppy, which was perhaps "a few months old", probably looked like a small wolf when it lived roughly 15,800 years ago, according to study co-author Laurent Frantz of the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Before Wednesday, the oldest-known dog DNA was from 10,900 years ago.

Also breaking that record was genetic evidence the team found in southwest England dating back 14,300 years, which illustrated how early dogs had spread across Europe.  Frantz said scientists could not prove exactly what role these dogs had among humans living during the last Ice Age. "But I think we can assume that they must have played a role because they would have been expensive to feed," he said.

The dogs probably lived on scraps from hunting mostly.

Perhaps the dogs were used for hunting or protection, he speculated. Even if these dogs were not treated the same as pets are today, there was likely still a strong bond, he said, adding that "kids will still have played with puppies".

Another sign of a close relationship was that puppies had been found buried above human graves in Pinarbasi.

 he Wombat has Rule Five Monday: Blue Monday up and garnering clicks at The Other McCain.

Now, About Those "Dire Wolves"

One of Colossal Biosciences’ dire wolves, possibly “Khaleesi.”

There have been lot of articles on the recent announcement that Colossal BioSciences has recreated the long extinct Dire Wolf. One at Reason, Colossal Biosciences Resurrects Long-Extinct Dire Wolf

Dire wolves went extinct around 12,000 years ago, at the end of the last ice age. Weighing around 150 pounds, they were about twice the size of today's gray wolves. Dire wolves roamed both North and South America, preying on ancient horses, camels, sloths, and bison.

Colossal Biosciences, the private company aiming to bring back from extinction the woolly mammoth, announced today that it had produced three dire wolf pups using genetic editing and cloning. The researchers at the company extracted and sequenced the genomes of dire wolves from a 13,000-year-old tooth from Ohio and a 72,000-year-old skull from Idaho. The researchers then made 15 key edits in gray wolf genomes to more closely match the genomes of dire wolves. The nuclei of the edited cells were then inserted into the enucleated dog eggs that were installed in the wombs of surrogate mother dogs. The result was the birth of four dire wolf pups (one died 10 days after birth).

The two six-month-old male pups are named Romulus and Remus, after the founders of Rome who were raised by wolves. The two-month-old female is Khaleesi, a title from Game of Thrones. The new dire wolves have thick white coat and are bigger than gray wolves, with more powerful shoulders, wider heads, larger teeth and jaws, and more muscular legs.

Currently, the wolves are living on a private 2,000-acre facility at an undisclosed location in the northern United States. Some native nations have expressed interest in eventually providing land where dire wolves can once again roam freely.

Colossal Biosciences continues its work to bring woolly mammoths, dodos, and the Tasmanian wolves back from extinction.

Don't get me wrong, this is a major achievement in genetic manipulation, but it is absolutely not the recreation of the infamous dire wolves of the American Ice Ages. Dire wolves, contrary to common opinions, were not just large wolves, they were a totally different branch of the canine family, and a handful of gene edits are not going to change one species into another. What they have produced are GMO wolves, bigger than the original. Wikipedia actually has a pretty thorough (and likely fairly accurate, as the topic in not political and noncontroversial) article on Dire Wolves (there were more than one species), and they actually overlapped in size with the largest American wolves.

All of which reminds me of one of my favorite Grateful Dead songs. 

The Wombat has Rule 5 Sunday: Fresh From The Shower up and garnering clicks at The Other McCain on time and under budget.

Jon Snow Will Be So Disappointed

Stuff Ted sends, from Sci Am, Dire Wolves Were Not Really Wolves

Ever since they were first described in the 1850s, dire wolves have captured modern humans’ imagination. Their remains have been found throughout much of the Americas, from Idaho to Bolivia. The La Brea asphalt seeps famously document how prey animals mired in tar lured many of these ice age predators to a sticky death. The dire wolves’ tar-preserved remains reveal an imposing hunter up to six feet long, with skull and jaw adaptations to take down enormous, struggling megafauna. Though these canids had clearly evolved to handle the mastodons, horses, bison and other large herbivores then roaming the Americas, skeletal resemblances between dire wolves and the smaller gray wolves of today suggested a close kinship. It had long been assumed that dire wolves made themselves at home in North America before gray wolves followed them across the Bering Land Bridge from Eurasia. Now some well-preserved DNA seems to be fundamentally changing the story.

One of the researchers’ questions was how dire wolves were related to other wolves. For decades, paleontologists have remarked on how similar the bones of dire wolves and gray wolves are. Sometimes it is difficult to tell them apart. “My hunch was that dire wolves were possibly a specialized lineage or subspecies of gray wolf,” Mitchell says.

But the new evidence told a different story. Preliminary genetic analyses indicated that dire and gray wolves were not close relatives. “I think I can speak for the whole group when I say the results were definitely a surprise,” Perri says.

After sequencing five genomes from dire wolf fossils between 50,000 and 13,000 years old, the researchers found that the animals belonged to a much older lineage of dogs. Dire wolves, it now appeared, had evolved in the Americas and had no close kinship with the gray wolves from Eurasia; the last time gray wolves and dire wolves shared a common ancestor was about 5.7 million years ago. The strong resemblance between the two, the researchers say, is a case of convergent evolution, whereby different species develop similar adaptations—or even appearances—thanks to a similar way of life. Sometimes such convergence is only rough, such as both birds and bats evolving wings despite their differing anatomy. In the case of dire and gray wolves, lives of chasing large herbivores to catch some meat on the hoof resulted in two different canid lineages independently producing wolflike forms.

In technical terms, the new findings mean dire wolves may need a new genus name to indicate they are no longer part of the genus Canis, to which gray wolves belong. Perri, Mitchell and their colleagues suggest Aenocyon, meaning “terrible wolf.” But the researchers don’t expect their findings to completely overturn tradition, and Aenocyon dirus would likely continue to be called the dire wolf. “They will just join the club of things like maned wolves that are called wolves but aren’t really,” Perri says.

The new findings also add layers to experts’ ruminations on why dire wolves eventually disappeared as the last ice age closed. These predators became specialized in hunting camels, horses, bison and other herbivores in North America over millions of years. As those prey sources disappeared, so did the dire wolves. “In contrast to gray wolves, which are a model for adaptation,” Perri says, “dire wolves appear to be much less flexible to deal with changing environments and prey.”

Nor did dire wolves leave a genetic legacy beyond the decaying DNA in their ancient bones. Although canids such as wolves and coyotes often create hybrids, dire wolves apparently did not do so with any other canids that remain alive today. Perri, Mitchell and their colleagues found no DNA evidence of interbreeding between dire wolves and gray wolves or coyotes. Dire wolves were genetically isolated from other canids, Mitchell notes, so “hybridization couldn’t provide a way out” because dire wolves were probably unable to produce viable offspring with the recently arrived wolves from Eurasia.

Ted's comment with the link was So much for the “Dire Wolf Project”. Not necessarily, while you may not be able to reassemble the actual genes that produced the original Dire Wolf, you could still produce a reasonable simulacrum. And, if you actually have a good sample of the DNA, maybe you can recreate the original, the same way some are trying to recreate the Mammoth from its genes.

The Wombat has Rule Five Sunday: Happy Easter! ready for your amusement at The Other McCain.

The Beginning of the Dog Days

From David Middleton at WUWT: Start of “Dog-ocene” dated to at least 28,500 years ago

New Study Results Consistent With Dog Domestication During Ice Age
by Matt McGowan | Feb 19, 2020 | Advancing the Data Revolution, Research News

Analysis of Paleolithic-era teeth from a 28,500-year-old fossil site in the Czech Republic provides supporting evidence for two groups of canids – one dog-like and the other wolf-like – with differing diets, which is consistent with the early domestication of dogs.

The study, published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, was co-directed by Peter Ungar, Distinguished Professor of anthropology at the University of Arkansas.

The researchers performed dental microwear texture analysis on a sample of fossils from the Předmostí site, which contains both wolf-like and dog-like canids. Canids are simply mammals of the dog family. The researchers identified distinctive microwear patterns for each canid morphotype. Compared to the wolf-like canids, the teeth of the early dog canids – called “protodogs” by the researchers – had larger wear scars, indicating a diet that included hard, brittle foods. The teeth of the wolf-like canids had smaller scars, suggesting they consumed more flesh, likely from mammoth, as shown by previous research.

Dog domestication is the earliest example of animal husbandry and the only type of domestication that occurred well before the earliest definitive evidence of agriculture. However, there is robust scientific debate about the timing and circumstances of the initial domestication of dogs, with estimates varying between 15,000 and 40,000 years ago, well into the Ice Age, when people had a hunter-gatherer way of life. There is also debate about why wolves were first domesticated to become dogs. From an anthropological perspective, the timing of the domestication process is important for understanding early cognition, behavior and the ecology of early Homo sapiens.
[…]
University of Arkansas

Saved from Facebook:

The Wombat was a day late with Rule 5 Monday: Annabella Sciorra.

Oregon Going to the Wolves

Wolf OR-7

Wolf attack kills dog guarding cattle in southern Oregon

State wildlife officials say a dog guarding cattle in southern Oregon has died after being attacked by a wolf.

The report released Wednesday says an examination of the Tibetan mastiff's body revealed 25 puncture wounds and scrape marks all over its body.

The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife says the attack early Monday occurred in an area frequented by a gray wolf known as OR-7 and his pack.

The incident happened southeast of Prospect.

The last confirmed attack by OR-7 and his pack was in January when two calves were killed two days apart near Butte Falls.

A Tibeten Mastiff? That's a pretty tough dog!

And Prospect isn't that far from our old stomping grounds in Southern Oregon, as the wolf wanders. OR-7 was born in NE Oregon near Idaho, and has been spotted in California.

A Howl of a Good Time

Anneka Svenska:

Anneka Svenska is a naturalist, broadcaster and film maker, who specialises in wolves, wildlife crime, films for animal & environmental charities and wildlife conservation. Anneka is also the face and creator of top wildlife online TV Show ANIMAL WATCH.

Anneka is a canid expert, wolf enthusiast and handler and has filmed and worked alongside both European and North American Timber Wolves as well as living with high content wolfdogs on a daily basis. Anneka is not afraid to speak of her love of apex predators and is quite at home swimming with great whites, catching snakes, tracking wolves in the wild and anything which involves dangerous, or rather, misunderstood animals.

Anneka appears as a regular guest on UK news and current affairs shows includingGood Morning Britain, BBC News, Channel 5 News, ITV and Sky news where she is invited to discuss topical wildlife news items, canids and animal rescue. Most recently she is filming with Channel 5 on new show When TV Animals go horribly Wrong. 

Wombat-socho has a double stuffed Rule 5 Sunday: Morena Baccarin.

Got a Moose Problem? Bring in the Wolves!

4 Canadian wolves air-dropped in US national park to deal with moose

Four Canadian wolves were captured and air-dropped on Lake Superior's Isle Royale National Park in Michigan – effectively doubling the pack’s current numbers – as part of an effort to rebuild the dwindling wolf population and help control the moose population, officials said Monday.

Helicopter crews fired net guns to capture the wolves, three males and one female, in Ontario last week, the National Park Service said. The wolves were sedated and examined by veterinarians before being transported to the U.S.

The wolves are being reintroduced to the island to help control the moose population, estimated to be near 1,500. If the moose herd is not kept in check, the animals will continue overeating the island’s shrubs and trees and increase their chances of mass starvation, CBC reported.

The arrival of the Canadian wolves boosted the park's wolf total to eight – four males and four females – including the last two survivors of a dwindling population that had occupied the park for about 70 years. Four wolves from Minnesota were brought to the park last fall, but one died and another left for the mainland across an ice bridge formed during February’s polar vortex, FOX9 Minneapolis reported.

You don't have to kill the adults to control the Moose population.

A Dire Wolf Shot in Montana?

Extremely unlikely Almost impossible, but until the DNA test comes back we can hold out hope:  Mysterious wolf-like creature shot in northcentral Montana near Denton

On May 16 a lone wolf-like animal was shot and killed on a ranch outside Denton. With long grayish fur, a large head and an extended snout, the animal shared many of the same characteristics as a wolf; but its ears were too large, it's legs and body too short, its fur uncharacteristic of that common to a wolf.

So what was it? At this point, no one is 100 percent sure.

"We have no idea what this was until we get a DNA report back," said Bruce Auchly, information manager for Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks. "It was near a rancher's place, it was shot, and our game wardens went to investigate. The whole animal was sent to our lab in Bozeman. That's the last I ever heard of it."

"That's a grizzly cub," one commentator wrote. "Under a year and starving from the look." "Maybe a dire wolf," wrote another, "because I don't believe they are all gone."

Speculation roamed as far as identifying that animal as a crypto-canid species said to roam the forests of North America.

"That could very well be what’s being called Dogman," one poster suggested. "They’re spotted each day and the government quells any and all reports. Several people report being strong armed into keeping quiet about their reports by men wearing black suits. These are just facts. Look into if if you don’t believe it."

Auchly doesn't.

"First off (dire wolf) was a song by the Grateful Dead from 1971," he said of the prehistoric species speculation. "I know; I listened to it many times. Number two, it's a prehistoric animal, like mastodons and saber toothed tigers; so it doesn't exist."

I'm betting on a dog/wolf hybrid.

 "We've had a few instances of wolf/dog hybrids out there," Smucker said. "One was out somewhere in eastern central Montana killing sheep like crazy. Finally, we caught it and it turned out to be a hybrid."

Not That There Was Ever Any Question, But . . .

Science says: Yes, your dog really does love you

 . . .Which brings me to the work of Dr. Gregory Berns, a neuroscientist at Emory University and the author of “What It’s Like to Be a Dog.”

Berns has, from what I can tell, the best gig in neuroscience. He spends all day taking pictures of dog brains. Don’t worry: He doesn’t remove them. He uses magnetic resonance imaging to study what’s going on in Fido’s head. It’s tougher than it sounds because the dogs have to hold still for Berns to get a good read. But that’s OK. They got the goodest doggos around, as folks on dog-obsessed Twitter might say, to volunteer.

Gotta save characters on Twitter, you know.

And what did Berns discover? Something that almost every dog owner in the world could have told you: Dogs aren’t faking it when they act like they love you. It’s not an act.

Berns and his team confirmed this through a host of tests that looked at different centers of the doggie brain and how they responded to different stimuli. In one test they alternated between giving the pooches hot dogs (the food, not Dachshunds) and offering them praise.

 We call Dachshunds, and other small dogs "mobile kibble."

Looking at the pleasure centers of the dogs’ brains, the researchers found that nearly all the dogs responded to “Who’s a good boy?! You are!” (or whatever they actually said) with at least as much pleasure as when they got a Hebrew National. A fifth of the dogs actually preferred praise to food.

Berns concluded that dogs derive as much pleasure from love as from food. . .

I don't know; Skye sure loves her Dentistix . . .

As a somewhat obsessed dog guy, I’m the first to concede that a central tenet of doggie philosophy is to reject the whole love-vs.-food paradigm as a false choice. Dogs are committed to the idea that there is no such thing as too much of a good thing. But as almost anyone who has come home to their dog after an extended absence will tell you, dogs don’t go bonkers for missing loved ones solely because they think there’s a meal in it for them.

And yet, there are people who argue almost precisely that. There’s what I would call the dumb version and the smart version of that particular school of thought. The dumb version, as the label suggests, is dumb. It can be found in people who say things like, “Dogs just lick you for the salt,” or, “It’s just an animal; you shouldn’t care about its feelings.”

Look in those eyes, and tell me you shouldn't care about it's feelings.

The smart version has more merit. Evolutionary psychologists and other scientists label dogs “social parasites” or, in the words of some, “con artists.” They claim that dogs evolved from wolves to exploit our weakness for cuteness. They also note that dogs evolved an ability found almost nowhere else in the animal world: to read human body language and expressions.

Indeed, Berns found evidence of this in his MRI studies.

Some, rightly, reject the term “parasitism” in favor of “mutualism,” because while dogs certainly benefitted from the warmth of cavemen’s campfires and the tossed scraps from their mastodon kills, they also made important contributions as guard dogs and hunters.

Pat Shipman even speculates in “The Invaders: How Humans and Their Dogs Drove Neanderthals to Extinction” that dogs gave us a competitive advantage against our (presumably) hated rivals, the Neanderthals. Dogs — or proto-wolf/dogs — weren’t so much pets as allies in hunting big game, helping us evolve as a cooperative species.

Dogs are GMO wolves. One of those genetic modifications was a change to include people in their social structure. Wolves have a strong social structure, with dominance at the top, and love and support for the pack all around, because they depend on the pack to bring down big prey. The Alpha wolf may rule the pack, but he can't kill a Moose or a Bison by himself. Even the weakest omega wolf contributes to the kill, and get his or her turn at the meal, even if after the good parts are mostly gone.

In the domestication, or maybe co-evolution of wolves and humans, humans were unable to tolerate true alpha wolves, and selected for dogs that accept humans in the role of the top dog. It's not that they don't know the difference between people and dogs, anyone who walks a dog knows that, but they accept the primacy of the humans in their social structure. In return, they evolved an uncanny ability to read our emotions (this was almost certainly a huge selective pressure), and got first crack at all the best garbage.

A few weeks ago, when the news came out about excessive  Huskies coming up for adoption because of "Game of Thrones Effect," someone on Facebook made the statement that Huskies lack a homing instinct, and don't bond with their owners like normal dogs. I responded that they just looked back after 20 miles and thought "Where did they go? I told them to keep up!", and that they were bonded just fine to their owners, but willing to consider a trade up.

Wombat-socho scores a day late with "Late Night With Rule 5 Monday: Coffee, Please".

California Continues to Go to the Wolves

Another pack of gray wolves spotted in California

A female gray wolf, her mate and at least three pups are the second pack of wolves spotted in Northern California since the species went extinct in 1924, state wildlife officials said Wednesday.

The gray pups were born this spring in Lassen National Forest to a female wolf of unknown origins. Her mate is the son of OR7, a wolf with a tracking device that was the first of its kind in almost a century to migrate into California from Oregon, the Department of Fish and Wildlife said.

Biologists began surveying the Lassen National Forest area in May after they found evidence of wolf presence.

On June 30, they captured the 75-pound female gray wolf and fitted her with a tracking collar. An examination revealed she had recently given birth to pups.

A day later, Department of Fish and Wildlife biologists returned to the area for a follow-up check on the female and found that a nearby trail camera operated by the United States Forest Service had captured photos of the mother and pups. The gray pups were also photographed playing in front of the camera.

Cool!

The Mighty Coywolfdog

Greater than the sum of its parts: It is rare for a new animal species to emerge in front of scientists’ eyes. But this seems to be happening in eastern North America

The mixing of genes that has created the coywolf has been more rapid, pervasive and transformational than many once thought. Javier Monzón, who worked until recently at Stony Brook University in New York state (he is now at Pepperdine University, in California) studied the genetic make-up of 437 of the animals, in ten north-eastern states plus Ontario. He worked out that, though coyote DNA dominates, a tenth of the average coywolf’s genetic material is dog and a quarter is wolf.

The DNA from both wolves and dogs (the latter mostly large breeds, like Doberman Pinschers and German Shepherds), brings big advantages, says Dr Kays. At 25kg or more, many coywolves have twice the heft of purebred coyotes. With larger jaws, more muscle and faster legs, individual coywolves can take down small deer. A pack of them can even kill a moose.

Hell, a big pack of chipmunks could take down an elephant. But it would take a lot of chipmunks.

Coyotes dislike hunting in forests. Wolves prefer it. Interbreeding has produced an animal skilled at catching prey in both open terrain and densely wooded areas, says Dr Kays. And even their cries blend those of their ancestors. The first part of a howl resembles a wolf’s (with a deep pitch), but this then turns into a higher-pitched, coyote-like yipping.

The animal’s range has encompassed America’s entire north-east, urban areas included, for at least a decade, and is continuing to expand in the south-east following coywolves’ arrival there half a century ago. This is astonishing. Purebred coyotes never managed to establish themselves east of the prairies. Wolves were killed off in eastern forests long ago. But by combining their DNA, the two have given rise to an animal that is able to spread into a vast and otherwise uninhabitable territory. Indeed, coywolves are now living even in large cities, like Boston, Washington and New York. According to Chris Nagy of the Gotham Coyote Project, which studies them in New York, the Big Apple already has about 20, and numbers are rising.

I expect they're here as well. "Coyotes" have certainly been spotted and trapped in Calvert County, but I haven't seen or heard them yet.

Some speculate that this adaptability to city life is because coywolves’ dog DNA has made them more tolerant of people and noise, perhaps counteracting the genetic material from wolves—an animal that dislikes humans. And interbreeding may have helped coywolves urbanise in another way, too, by broadening the animals’ diet. Having versatile tastes is handy for city living. Coywolves eat pumpkins, watermelons and other garden produce, as well as discarded food. They also eat rodents and other smallish mammals. Many lawns and parks are kept clear of thick underbrush, so catching squirrels and pets is easy. Cats are typically eaten skull and all, with clues left only in the droppings.

Which can only make bird lovers happy, since undomesticated cats are major bird killers in the east.

Thanks to this bounty, an urban coywolf need occupy only half the territory it would require in the countryside. And getting into town is easy. Railways provide corridors that make the trip simple for animals as well as people.

Surviving once there, though, requires a low profile. As well as having small territories, coywolves have adjusted to city life by becoming nocturnal. They have also learned the Highway Code, looking both ways before they cross a road. Dr Kays marvels at this “amazing contemporary evolution story that’s happening right underneath our nose”.

Whether the coywolf actually has evolved into a distinct species is debated. Jonathan Way, who works in Massachusetts for the National Park Service, claims in a forthcoming paper that it has. He thinks its morphological and genetic divergence from its ancestors is sufficient to qualify. But many disagree. One common definition of a species is a population that will not interbreed with outsiders. Since coywolves continue to mate with dogs and wolves, the argument goes, they are therefore not a species. But, given the way coywolves came into existence, that definition would mean wolves and coyotes should not be considered different species either—and that does not even begin to address whether domestic dogs are a species, or just an aberrant form of wolf.

The biological definition of a species is not quite that didactic. It presumes that hybridization is rare, often infertile, and usually results in less fit offspring than the separate species, but in cases where the offspring are fertile, and more fit for a particular environment than either parent species, it is possible for hybridization to found a new species.

Is it truly a new species? Ultimately the distinction is arbitrary, and best left to the bug shufflers who do taxonomy. The coywolves don't give a damn what they think; they're too busy getting by.

Did Neandertal Go to the Dogs?

Did Dog-Human Alliance Drive Out the Neanderthals?

In her new book, The Invaders: How Humans and Their Dogs Drove Neanderthals to Extinction, Pat Shipman, retired adjunct professor of anthropology at Pennsylvania State University, sets out a groundbreaking new argument.

Talking from her home in North Carolina, she explains how reading about invasive species while holidaying on a Caribbean island inspired her, why more accurate carbon-dating methods have revised the timeline for Neanderthal extinction, and how the discovery of "wolf dog" remains at woolly mammoth sites in Central and Eastern Europe may hold the key to understanding why humans went on to build the Sistine chapel and send a robot to Mars while Neanderthals became a footnote in popular culture.

Except that there's a little Neanderthal (~5%) left in most of us non-Africans as a result of a small amount in interbreeding.

First of all I want to say that when I use the term wolf dog, I don't mean a hybrid between a wolf and a modern dog. It's not clear if it's appropriate to call these things wolves or dogs. They're not modern dogs, and they're not modern wolves. They're not ancient wolves, either. They're a distinctive group. Forty individual specimens, at a number of different sites, have been identified as what I'm calling wolf dogs.

They're large, have big teeth and all those predatory, dog/wolf characteristics. You have to assume from the anatomy that they could track very well from the scent of an animal. They were built to be fast running, as wolves and most dogs are. Humans don't run terribly fast. We have a crappy sense of smell. We do cooperate with each other, which is helpful, and we had long-distance weapons, like spears and bows and arrows.

Some of the work on these "proto" dogs suggest they were the size and shape of large huskies.

Neanderthals seem to have specialized in stabbing an animal at close quarters with handheld weapons and wrestling it down. We had weapons we could launch from a distance, which is a very big advantage. There's a lot less risk of personal injury.

Add into that mix the doggy traits of being able to run for hours much faster than we can, track an animal by its scent, then with a group of other wolf dogs surround the animal and hold it in place while you tire it out. The advantage for wolf dogs is that humans can come in and kill from a distance. The wolf dogs don't have to go and kill this thing with their teeth, thereby lowering the risk of injury and death from very large animals like mammoths. For humans, it meant you could find the animals a lot quicker and kill them more efficiently. More food, less risk, faster.

People have been using dogs to hunt for a long time. Plus people tend to leave a lot of edible garbage behind, at least from a dog's point of view.

A lot of the new evidence from your claims came from an archaeological site in Předmostí, in the Czech Republic. Describe this place and how these finds revolutionized our understanding of Neanderthals.

Předmostí is one of a series of archaeological sites in Central and Eastern Europe. They're really weird sites because they're full of dead mammals. Before modern humans came into Eurasia, there was little evidence that Neanderthals were killing mammoths on a regular basis. They're huge! Attacking them with handheld weapons was probably too intimidating, unless you came across a baby mammoth.

 I've heard the Pygmies kill elephants in the Congo by stabbing them in the gun with spears, and then tracking them until they die.

But once modern humans arrive on the scene, you start finding these sites with dozens and sometimes hundreds of dead mammoths. At some, the bones are so concentrated that if the mammoths were alive they couldn't stand in the territory where their bones are.

Neanderthals didn't have the chops to bring down woolly mammoths, but modern humans hunted them successfully, thanks to their wolf dog partners.

 I think the scientists should try the experiment with modern elephants, and their own dogs.

These mammoth megasites, as they became known, contain an outrageous amount of mammoths. So what's changed that is going to enable modern humans to kill all these animals? Neanderthals couldn't, and they weren't inept. Distance weapons of the kind that humans had might have been helpful, but you had to track the darn thing as it died.

And that's where wolf dogs come in, because wolf dogs are found with lots of mammoth bones. Some of these sites even have beautiful tent-shaped huts made out of mammoth bone. This suggests people were there for a long time. They were living there and building these settlements where the animals died.

This is an elaboration of a theory that we've seen before, that dogs and modern humans co-evolved, that in the process of "domesticating" the wolf both the domesticated wolf and modern humans evolved to work together. This theory goes on to suppose that this is the reason that the dog-human collaboration made the difference between modern human dominating the modern world or not, and thus overwhelming the Neanderthal, who had survived fairly well in Europe up until that point.

True? It's hard to tell, and I think it will be different find anything more than correlative evidence. Dog bites on a Neanderthal skeleton?

Wombat-socho has "Rule 5 Sunday: Summertime Girls" ready at The Other McCain.

In The Timbers of Finlandio The Wolves Are Running Round

Wolf pack appears in western Uusimaa

Four cubs were filmed by a game camera in late June near the border of Raseborg and Salo. Their parents are apparently Finland's southernmost breeding wolf pair in more than a century. The adults have been observed in the area for about a year, but no livestock damages have been reported.

The Finnish Hunters' Association notes that there is an abundant supply of deer and elk in the area, and large contiguous forest areas.

“This is typical behaviour for a wolf pair: they wander around for a couple of years before having cubs and settling down to live as a pack in a certain area,” says Teemu Simenius of the Finnish Hunters' Association.

He says that this is the furthest south wolves have been observed to breed in a century, although lone wolves have been sighted even further south, including on the Hanko and Porkkala peninsulas.

Please don't murder me!

Apparently, wolves are doing rather well in Europe:

And it's not just Finland! Apparently, it's a trend all across Europe, as Stephanie Pappas of the Christian Science Monitor reported in December 2014:

"Despite having half the land area of the contiguous United States and double the population density, Europe is home to twice as many wolves as the U.S.
...
Wolves are thriving, with more than 12,000 individuals found in 10 populations in 28 countries ."

Where Does a Wolf Sleep?

Wherever it damn well wants.

The Coywolves are Coming!

In fact, they're pretty well here. The New York Times has an uncharacteristically good and mostly reasonable article on coywolves (coyote/wolf/dog hybrids) and other natural hybrid animals being found across America:

Should You Fear the Pizzly Bear?

 . . .The creation story White and his colleagues have pieced together begins during European colonization, when the Eastern wolf was hunted and poisoned out of existence in its native Northeast. A remnant population — “loyalists” is how White refers to them — migrated to Canada. At the same time, coyotes, native to the Great Plains, began pushing eastward and mated with the refugee wolves. Their descendants in turn bred with coyotes and dogs. The result has been a creature with enough strength to hunt the abundant woodland deer, which it followed into the recovering Eastern forests. Coywolves, or Eastern coyotes, as White prefers to call them, have since pushed south to Virginia and east to Newfoundland. The Eastern coyote is a study in the balancing act required to survive as a medium-size predator in a landscape full of people. It can be as much as 40 percent larger than the Western coyote, with powerful wolflike jaws; it has also inherited the wolf’s more social nature, which allows for pack hunting. (In 2009, a pack of Eastern coyotes attacked and killed a 19-year-old Canadian folk singer named Taylor Mitchell in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia.) But it shares with coyotes, some 2,000 of which live within Chicago’s city limits, a remarkable ability to thrive in humanized landscapes.

“We’re kind of privileged in the last 100 years to watch the birth of this entity,” White told me, “and now the evolution of this entity across this North American landscape that we’ve modified.” Evolutionarily speaking, coyotes diverged from gray wolves one million to two million years ago, and dogs from wolves roughly 15,000 years ago. Yet over the past century, as agriculture moved to the Midwest and California, farmland in the East reverted to woodlands. The rise of fossil fuels reduced the demand for firewood. Forests spread, and deer and other prey proliferated, while human intolerance for wolves kept a potential competitor at bay. . .

The "coywolves' have been widely sighted in the northeast and mid-Atlantic states, including our own Calvert County, although I have yet to see one. I did see one scrawny western coyote standing along the side of the Pacific Coast highway, and he looked like a potential meal for the coywolf above.

Found at Althouse, who reads the NYT so you don't have to.

My Feelings Exactly

Swiped from Theo's.

Delisting Plan Going to the Wolves?

From behind the Science pay wall: Science Behind Plan to Ease Wolf Protection Is Flawed, Panel Says

A controversial proposal to lift U.S. government protections for most gray wolves living in the lower 48 states suffered a major blow last week, when an independent review panel nixed the underlying science. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) had argued that the gray wolf, which has rebounded in some parts of the West, does not need continued protection to recover in the East because it never lived there. But the four-member panel unanimously dismissed that argument, saying it "does not currently represent the 'best available science.'

Click to expand

"Best available science" is one of those phrases that should cause you're ears to prick up the way "The check is in the mail" and "it's OK, I'm on birth control" do.  It's a clue they might be trying to put one over on you.

"The panel's 7 February report is the latest twist in a messy and emotionally fraught saga. Wolf researchers estimate that some 2 million wolves lived in the continental United States 600 years ago (see map). After being hunted to near extinction, the gray wolf (Canis lupus) was placed on the federal endangered species list in 1975. It was later reintroduced in the Rocky Mountains over vehement objections from ranchers and others. The population ultimately recovered to some 6000 animals in some western and upper midwestern states, and in 2011 the federal government lifted wolf protections in six of those states, all of which now have legal hunts. In June 2013, FWS released its proposal to totally remove the gray wolf from the endangered species list in every state, while adding protections for the Mexican gray wolf, a subspecies in the Southwest. It also proposed to recognize a new—and controversial—species of wolf, Canis lupus lycaon, or the eastern wolf, which some argue is found today in eastern Canada.

It's hard to imagine how they could claim to find evidence for a new species of wolf (a subspecies, really, with the subspecies name lycaon added to the species name lupus) at this late date.

In a 2012 monograph published in-house without review, four FWS scientists drew on genetic and other evidence to argue that the gray wolf had never inhabited the upper Midwest and Northeast; instead, only the eastern wolf had occupied that territory. That scenario, if true, would support delisting the gray wolf because it means federal officials don't have a legal obligation to try to restore the species to 22 eastern states.

As a taxonomic lumper (one who believes that finely divided species and subspecies do not reflect an underlying reality), I think this is likely a distinction of convenience, which allow FWS to claim they're doing what they can for the western wolves, while allowing them to deny the necessity under the law to restore wolves in the east if possible, which would not be a popular move with eastern farmers, loose pet owners, and possibly mothers of children who tend to stray.

It appears the agency was trying to use "some kind of taxonomic sleight of hand" to support delisting, says panelist Robert Wayne, a conservation geneticist at UC Los Angeles. That would set a "dangerous precedent," he adds: It would be the first time that the federal government has removed a species from the list as a result of a taxonomic redefinition, and not a population recovery.

I'd like to see wolves re-established in suitable parts of the east.  I suggest we start with New York's Central Park, or rather Manhattan, since no wolf would ever accept such a small territory.  Rock Creek Park might hold a small pack, at least part time, and it would obviate the need for snipers to clear out the excess White Tailed deer, as well as serve as thin out the slower joggers. If they have to borrow a few Eastern Canadian wolves to do it, that's OK, too.

In other potentially good news for wolves, the brutal winter in the Great Lakes may give the struggling, inbred population of wolves ordinarily stuck on Lake Surperior's  Isle Royale a bit of a break in the form of some fresh genes, or an escape route:

In Lake Superior, snowbound Isle Royale National Park is home to a dwindling and inbred wolf population that is usually trapped on the island. Biologists hope a newcomer or two will venture to the park now that the lake is almost entirely frozen over. The park's first wolves are believed to have crossed an ice bridge from Canada, 15 miles away, in the late 1940s.

There's also a chance that one or more of the island's wolves could grab the rare opportunity to escape.

"They are inveterate travelers," veteran wolf expert Rolf Peterson said. "And they don't need a reason that would make sense to us."

Coming to a park near you?

The Wolf at the Door...

comes inside: Camper Wakes With Head in Wolf's Jaws

A Minnesota teen says he won't be going camping again for a while after surviving the first known wolf attack on a human in state history. Noah Graham, 16, awoke before dawn to find his head gripped in the jaws of a 75-pound gray wolf. ".
...
Noah needed 17 staples to close a wound in his head and is receiving anti-rabies shots. Police later shot and killed a wolf believed to have been the culprit... The wolf had a deformed jaw which would have made it hard to go after large prey, it may have become accustomed to scavenging for food at the campground, and Noah's reddish-brown hair may have caused the wolf to mistake his head for a smaller creature.

Best Werewolf Prank Evah...

Wombat-Socho got "Rule 5 Sunday Wednesday: Once More into the Bleach" done on Wednesday this week; he says he's skipping next week to slave in the tax mines, and promises a double sized in the following week.  So check back Saturday morning to see what I've cooked up.

Has Philadelphia Gone to the Wolves?

Penny the wolf hybrid?  Could be...

or wolf, rather.  Wolf, or something, still roaming Pennypack Park

Since late last week, employees of the Speedwell Forge Wolf Sanctuary have camped out in a pickup truck on a residential street in Rhawnhurst hoping to capture a creature they have nicknamed Penny.

No one knows just what Penny is. She — the Wolf Sanctuary crew refers to her in feminine terms — could be a dog, a wolf, a coyote, or a blend of species. But the team from the Wolf Sanctuary in Lititz, Pa., along with workers from the Pennsylvania Game Commission, local animal control agents, and residents of Penny's adopted Algon Avenue habitat, know she prefers McDonald's to a deer carcass.

On Tuesday, Penny, who might be an abandoned pet, eluded traps set by Wolf Sanctuary workers and regularly peeked from the edge of the woods of Pennypack Park — to the delight of spectators.

"I've been seeing her. I've been feeding her Kibbles 'n Bits," said Dale Pyle, an Algon resident who said he has observed the animal for the past two months.

Game Commission and Wolf Sanctuary employees have laid traps in the woods and fed the animal a tranquilizer-laced hot dog.

Next, Wolf Sanctuary worker Dustin Deyoe said, they plan to shoot her with a tranquilizer dart equipped with a remote tracking device. Once she lies down, they will take her to a vet for DNA testing. If she is at least 65 percent wolf, then she can have a home in the 25-acre sanctuary in Lancaster County.

I vote to leave her be. Wolves could only improve Philadelphia by thinning the herd.  A least she's not a zombie.