We're sometimes told to distinguish "domestication" (e.g. cat) versus "taming" (cheetah). So maybe that's going on in a Baltic island 3000 BC. Presently the dog is tame and domestic, housebroken or at least kennelbroken; from a wolf ancestor. Last I heard, that ancestor was a Eurasian red wolf no longer seen today. We did not domesticate, nor tame, the - say - jackal.
Sometimes wild wolves are tamed from cubs and will accept a human caretaker into their pack. But they are not dogs and remain not easy to handle. Some dog breeds have been made as half-wolf hybrids (like in Alpha); this process also happened in our deep past with special breeds like, I think, the husky. In reverse America (at least) has some wolves with coyote and feral dog introgression as well.
Anyway: the Baltic protoGermanics (I suspect) were able to coëxist with some local (grey) wolves. I don't know how far these canicated lupines were domestic... and, in fairness, "domicile" might be itself fungible to a near-Arctic population of likely seminomadic shellfish-gatherers.
I ponder if we may extrapolate. Consider any pygmy wolf from any island or isolated valley - not in fringe Denmark, but in the Indonesia (or Ingushetia, wherever). As noted you can't bat a wolf's nose with a newspaper, nor with an empty softwoven reed basket in the old days. But you can so assert your alpha status against a smaller animal, like a fox. As the thus-tamed fox can be domesticated in a few vulpine generations, a pygmy wolf should be.
BACKDATE 11/30
No comments:
Post a Comment