So it is puzzling to be reminded once again that teams of scientists across three continents, equipped with the most sophisticated genomic technology ever devised, have wasted years of their lives studying, well, me.
The Boss has uncovered two recent articles in the prestigious journal Nature revealing how these scientists have excavated sites in Turkey, Serbia, Italy, the UK, Switzerland and Iran, unearthing 15,000-year-old dog bones and extracting the DNA.
The headline finding, which I could have offered them in exchange for a Woolies roast chicken (in itself an evolutionary leap from scraps around a Palaeolithic campfire) is that we dogs are very old and very widespread. We were in Turkey 15,800 years ago. We were in the UK 14,300 years ago. We were in Germany, Switzerland and Italy around the same time.
We were, in short, everywhere humans were – because that is where the food is. I fail to see why this discovery required mass spectrometry. While it is flattering to have our noble lineage confirmed, you would think that, over 15 millennia, they could have at least perfected the dog biscuit.
And what supports my long-held theory that we are more evolved than humans is this: that despite the distance between Turkey and Somerset being roughly 4000km, the dogs at both sites were genetically identical.
We were a coherent tribe – yet moving between different groups of hunter-gatherers, who were themselves genetically distinct from each other. The humans were swapping dogs. The dogs were not, apparently, swapping humans. We were the original international diplomats – while the humans were scrapping over territories.
The scientists find this curious. They call it evidence of “exchange among genetically and culturally distinct western Eurasian Palaeolithic human populations”.
I call it evidence that we were, even then, highly valued and universally loved.
There are darker revelations in this research that I feel obliged to raise. The humans at Gough’s Cave, a site in Somerset, practised what the scientists call “funerary cannibalism” – they made drinking cups out of their dead relatives’ skulls.
The remains at Gough’s Cave showed they did the same to their dogs! Which shows, on the one hand, that canine dignity and human barbarity are only a paw’s width apart.
On the other hand, this practice has to be the gold standard of ‘good boy’ status: I’ll be lucky to get a headstone under the old yellow box, but these ancestors of mine were practically honorary aunts and uncles.
Indeed, the bones isotopes of the Gough’s Cave dogs showed the dogs and humans had comparable diets, essentially eating the same food. We were not pets, we were companions. Colleagues even. I expect The Boss to take note.
The central mystery remains: why have so many brilliant people devoted such significant portions of their careers to establishing, with genomic certainty, what any talking dog can tell you: that we have always been here, that we have always been alongside you, and that the relationship is very, very old.
Like dogs, scientists are creatures of obsessive focus. Show a dog a fresh hole and it will dig. Show a scientist an old bone and they will sequence it. We are kindred spirits – both of us digging deeper, neither of us entirely sure of what we will find, both of us convinced it will be worth it. Woof!
