Archaeologists dig up dog tale

"You ain't nothin' but a hound dog, lying all the time."

It was the twist Dr. Greger Larsen chose to illustrate debates, studies and competing conclusions about how and when the wolf turned into a cocker spaniel, poodle or border collie.

Larsen was one of 13 presenters Friday at a symposium on the human-dog relationship as part of the 77th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

More than 3,000 archaeologists are attending the meeting at Memphis Cook Convention Center, where 2,000 sessions are scheduled through Sunday. Subjects range from mound-building by the Mississippian Native American culture to the use of mind-altering substances from ancient cultures to the present.

More than 100 archaeologists packed the popular session on the dog's path from wild predator to pampered house pet. Despite modern DNA analysis of animal remains in human settlements, it's still uncertain when dogs came in from the wild.

Larsen, an evolutionary biologist at Durham University in England, said dogs are the only animal domesticated before the development of agriculture. Larsen tailored his talk to Memphis, using Elvis Presley allusions to point out "suspicious minds" unable to agree on the time frame. Different studies have placed domestication estimates from a little less than 10,000 years ago to more than 135,000 years ago.

"Domestication is an evolutionary thing, a continuum," said Durham, who said the first house pets or companion animals as we now know them showed up about 2,000 years ago in Rome. "Before Rome, every dog is for a purpose," often for hunting, he said. "In the Victorian Era, it takes off," with house pets soon outnumbering working dogs, he said.

In his audience was Melinda Zeder, curator of Old World Archaeology for the Smithsonian Institution and a research archaeozoologist. She said fossil evidence for dog domestication "points to 14,000 to 17,000 years ago and correlates to when people settled and were not so nomadic." In their communities they left trash, which attracted wild creatures as scavengers.

Wolves already were social creatures, and the most social among them likely interacted with their human neighbors more and more. Archaeologists believe other sources, from jackals to coyotes, may have added to the gene pool.

As the creatures interbred, they led to more than 300 dog breeds, said Chris Widga, vertebrate paleontologist at Illinois State Museum. Widga said that by 7,000 years ago, terrier-sized dogs were being bred. As DNA models are refined, he predicted scientists will narrow down the domestication dates by the end of 2014.

While the domestication issue remains a mystery, Zeder at the Smithsonian said it did not stop with dogs. "Domestication is a very fluid thing that happens over time and is still happening." She said more creatures, once considered wild, likely will become domesticated in time. But people will always have an affinity for dogs. "Dogs are so much a part of our lives. They give people a way of connecting to the distant past and help us understand we're not a creature of the moment."

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