Researchers from the Finnish Food Authority, a department of the Ministry of Agriculture, suspected that the ice age hunter-gatherers of the ice age may have played a role in the early domestication of dogs. And they say they can explain for the first time why people would tolerate the company of a competing predator during this period.
Still, the team of Finnish Food Authority researchers wanted to know how this ‘mutually beneficial’ relationship came about, given that humans and wolves would compete for food in the winter months.
“People have killed cavemen and saber-toothed cats to remove other carnivores,” Maria Lahtinen, a senior scientist at the Finnish Food Authority, told CNN.
“People have not yet been able to explain why people would tolerate competitive carnivores in their living areas,” she said.
The researchers estimated how much energy was left by humans between 14,000 and 29,000 years ago from the meat of species they hunted for food, such as horse, elk and deer.
Their calculations indicated that hunter-gatherers during the winter months in Europe and Asia, who were not fully adapted to a carnivorous diet, had an excess of lean meat that they could share with wolves.
“During the late Paleolithic period, the climate was such that most of Europe and Asia had winters,” Lahtinen, the study’s first author, told CNN. “These were cold climate areas, which means that every year there were conditions where people had to access proteins,” she explained.
“People are naturally adapted to carnivorous diets, but we can only consume about 20% of protein in our diet,” she said.
The excess meat could easily be shared with wolves, the team says – a step towards a mutually beneficial relationship.
“After this initial period, novice dogs would have become comfortable and used in different ways, such as hunters, pack animals and guards, as well as by many similar evolutionary changes as humans,” the authors wrote in the newspaper. Published Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports.