11,500-year-old animal bones in Jordan suggest early dogs helped humans hunt

[Judi Lynn]

15-JAN-2019

UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN - FACULTY OF HUMANITIES

11,500 years ago in what is now northeast Jordan, people began to live alongside dogs and may also have used them for hunting, a new study from the University of Copenhagen shows. The archaeologists suggest that the introduction of dogs as hunting aids may explain the dramatic increase of hares and other small prey in the archaeological remains at the site.

Dogs were domesticated by humans as early as 14,000 years ago in the Near East, but whether this was accidental or on purpose is so far not clear. New research published in the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology by a team of archaeologists from the University of Copenhagen and University College London may suggest that humans valued the tracking and hunting abilities of early dogs more than previously known.

A study of animal bones from the 11,500 year old settlement Shubayqa 6 in northeast Jordan not only suggests that dogs were present in this region at the start of the Neolithic period, but that humans and dogs likely hunted animals together:

"The study of the large assemblage of animal bones from Shubayqa 6 revealed a large proportion of bones with unmistakable signs of having passed through the digestive tract of another animal; these bones are so large that they cannot have been swallowed by humans, but must have been digested by dogs," explained zooarchaeologist and the study's lead author Lisa Yeomans.

More:
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2019-01/uoc--1ab011519.php

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1. More than one Anthropologist has suggested that early canines may have taught humans to hunt

Or that early hominids modeled their hunting strategy after canines.