Dr. Lahtinen and her colleagues take competition out of the equation. In winter, man would have to give up plants from the ice age, depending on hunting. But humans cannot survive on protein alone. Eventually they starve or get protein poisoning. They need fat, so they would have mainly eaten the fatty prey, with even lean meat left over. Wolves, with different digestive systems, can live on pure protein for some time.
The researchers say in their article that animal proteins among human North Pole hunters could provide up to 45 percent of the calories in winter. They also calculated the amount of protein in the prey that wolves had available during the ice age, which showed that they contained protein “beyond the limits that humans can consume”. Humans and wolves hunt similar species, so if humans ingest the same animals, they will have excess protein from their death.
Humans, including modern hunter-gatherers, have a strange habit of feeding and keeping other animals for at least a while. The authors therefore lean towards the idea that different human ties sometimes snatch a wolfhound. Eventually, the two species grew closer together and the new dog wolves became useful. Thousands of years later we have pandemic puppies.
The hypothesis is simply that an idea about what might have happened is not a demonstration of what happened. But Naomi Sykes, a zoo archaeologist at the University of Exeter in Britain, who reviewed the article for publication, said she thinks the researchers make two important points. “The first is their suggestion that there should be minimal competition between humans and wolves in the diet.” The second, she said, was that their hypothesis led ‘the idea of domestication’ to people feeding animals, rather than feeding them.
She said archaeological finds suggest that the domestication of chickens, rabbits, horses and other animals may have begun with the deliberate feeding of the animals. According to some of the earliest discoveries, the old bones show that the animals are ‘maintained, cared for and even worshiped rather than eaten’.