The voyage of the Beagle

What a pleasure it is to re-read Charles Darwin’s Researches* with resources before me that I had not had when I read it many years ago! –a good map of South America so that I can follow his travels, and a book of the birds of southern South America. Darwin usually mentioned animals by their Latin names, and if he gave a common name it was usually in Spanish or Portuguese. Yet, even when the taxonomy has changed, as is often the case after well more than a century and a half, I can always find the bird’s identity, and an illustration. So, too, for the mammals. Yet one of the best resources now available that was not when I first read it is the on-line resources, including the full text and illustrations of all of Darwin’s works. This includes the supplements to his original work, and, most importantly the Zoology with its colour plates of the animals.

Darwin’s first edition of the Voyage of the Beagle was published in 1836. The second, 1845 edition is the one to read because (1) he had time to reflect upon evolution and the mechanism of it (natural selection), and he therefore added a number of comments that presaged his 1859 Origin of the Species and show how his ideas were germinating well before he reached the Galapagos, especially in Argentina and Chile; and (2) the Zoology of the Voyage of the Beagle was published in five parts by eminent scientific authorities for each group: 1 Fossil Mammalia by R. Owen (with a geological introduction by Darwin), 2 Mammalia by G. R. Waterhouse (with a geographical indroduction and notes on the habits and ranges of each species by Darwin), 3 Birds by J. Gould and G. R. Gray, 4. Fish by L. Jenyns, and 5 Reptiles [which included Amphibia] by T. Bell.

Since the five Zoology parts were published between from 1838 to 1843, in producing the 1845 edition of his Researches, Darwin could name each species and give details about its relationship to other species, living and extinct. This of course enabled a much fuller understanding of how species vary in time and space.

The Zoology contains beautiful colour plates that are artitistically, historically and taxonomically important. Since all of Darwin’s works are on-line (http://darwin-online.org.uk/contents.html), while reading his Researches, if you have a computer beside you, you can look up the pictures of animals he mentions.

The first version of Darwin’s Researches that I read was a modern Penguin Classics edition, a gift from a naïve colleague, that had been severely abridged by an editor trained in liberal arts, who had no appreciation for the science. I am using both meanings of “appreciation” here: she had neither understanding nor interest in Darwin’s description of the natural world. To make a “story” that to her was interesting and moderately succinct, she cut out large portions of the text, and these were invariably those describing flora, fauna, and geology. I regret that I gave my copy away in a book exchange, instead of burning it.

*Journal of researches into the natural history and geology of the countries visited during the voyage of H.M.S. Beagle round the world. London: John Murray. 2d edition, 1845. Often abbreviated simply as The voyage of the Beagle.

Buddhist Temples are Great for Birdwatching

Having to look up something related to Korea, I noticed how many photos I have of Buddhist temples there. I haven't been to Korea since 2005, but in the preceeding decade I went many times for conferences and to develop and teach training courses in marine environmental science. Each time I went, I took some time for myself to visit Buddhist temples. They are great for birdwatching, and the monks grow and serve the best tea I've found anywhere.

The South Seas Institute where I taught is on Goege Island, just off the south coast. Near it is the town of Tongyeong on the mainland, which lies in the lee of Miruksan, or Mt. Miruk, a great climb on good trails surrounded by natural beauty. The trail passes several temples, of which I will mention two.



The first photo shows Gwaneum-sa (sa means temple), part way up the mountain. You can see from the background that it is surrounded by bamboo and that is partly what attracts birds: some species live in the bamboo itself, and others just like the diversity. The monks planted the bamboo, in most cases centuries ago, so that they can use the stems for making furniture, pipes, and other utilities. Each temple also has a plot of tea plants and a garden plot. Most are beside a stream. It is the diversity of habitats around the temples that attracts so many birds--that and the karma, I suppose. This is where I saw my first Korean subspecies of Eurasian Jay, a much brighter and more colourful version.




The next photo shows Dosoram, not a temple so much as a hermitage for a couple of monks who live there. It lies just on the upper flank of Mt. Miruk where the trail begins its steep climb to the peak. The photo is of a shrine to a monk around 1100 years ago, it is said, who was hiding from enemies and was starving and wounded and took refuge in a cave, the entrance of which can be seen to the right of the shrine. He would have died, but a tiger took pity on him and nursed hime to health.



Next is Popki-sa (or Bopgye-sa), in Chiri-san (Chiri or Jiri Mountain) National Park, which is on the mainland. It is a long, unremittingly steep climb. At 1915 meters, Cheonhwang-bong (bong means peak) is the tallest in the South Korean mainland, making Popki-sa one of the highest temples, or the highest. I've been there twice: October 2004 when the mountain was a riot of fall colours, and May 2005 when the mountain and canyons were covered with pink, red, mauve and purple rhododendrons. The hike is worth it: this is were I saw and recorded the melodious song of my first Siberian Blue Robin, and dozens of other woodland and mountain songbird species.



I first noticed the bird life around temples in Suchow, China, "the Venice of the Orient" as Marco Polo called it, in 1993. It is an ancient city a couple of hours drive from Shanghai where one gets around by sampan through innumerable canals, passing under the same stone bridges that Marco Polo himself marvelled at. For hundreds of years, the beauty of this little city on the Grand Canal made it a place for rich people to retire, and many of their elaborate, formal gardens have been preserved. The old city of Suchow is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Its diversity waterbirds is amazing: I saw a Cinnamon Bittern, three kinds of egret, herons, ducks too numerous to mention, and many others.







A few years later, Hannah and went to Qingdao on the Shandong Peninsula. The temples and monasteries, even in this bustling city of 4 million, where oases of peace and forested tranquility, though rather thinly blessed with birds, it must be admitted.







We took a ride up the coast to a Buddhist temple complex at Laoshan. Lao means old and shan means mountain, and these mountains look it: the sharp relief and wrinkled terrain pocked with granite outcrops look like the very bones of the Earth. As always, the monks at Taiqing-gong, a Taoist palace-temple complex, have a tea plantation and there were birds aplenty. Then we hiked up a mile or so to a little temple (above) carved into the rocks by a spring, with some buildings perched on stone terraces built out from the mountain. Again, a myriad of bird species greeted us.



In 2003, Hannah and I went to Japan were we visited many temples, often climbing high mountains, such as the one pictured, a temple near Gifu Castle, overlooking the city of Gifu. This is where I saw my first Blue-and-White Flycatcher.



This next two photos are of a large garden in Hanoi dedicated to Confusius and to learning. Filled with birds: laughing thrushes, babblers, and so on.





Not "best for last" but this last one is one great temple for birding: Angkor Wat. I had a birding guide who brought tea and a banana-leaf wrapped breakfast and showed me so many birds: Coppersmith Barbet, Lineated Barbet, Hill Mynah, 2 species of parakeet, Forest Wagtail, Black Baza, Cotton Pygmy-goose, Indian Roller, Common Iora, Ashy Minivet, Rufous-tailed Rock-thrush, drongos, flycatchers, Brahminy Kite, and on and on.

Invasive Species Really Don't Belong Here

In September my brother and I drove through 12 ecozones from the Forest/Savannah Transition in Wisconsin through Tall Grasslands to the Western Short Grasslands in Colorado, my first time to see the American Prairie. For decades, I had read about conservationists’ efforts to restore its ecological integrity. At Blue Mounds State Park in Minnesota, we walked along a ridge at sunrise, saw bison in Northern Short Grasslands, and then stopped at the park office to chat with two conservation officers.

They described a 20-year long campaign against weeds in their bison range, but mentioned misgivings. They gave me a copy of an article about researcher Mark Davis of Macalester College, St. Paul. His research shows that exotic species often fit well into native ecosystems and contribute to ecosystem function and biodiversity.

Of course, some exotics are fine (e.g., exotic game birds and honeybees), but many are seriously ruinous to terrestrial or aquatic ecosystems or agriculture. Here in British Columbia, ranchers spend millions of dollars trying to limit the spread and reduce the density of knapweeds, for example, and farmers work hard to keep alien weeds out of their crops, as they do in Minnesota. Our aquatic biologists have likewise spent a small fortune trying to limit the growth of damaging aliens, such as the milfoil that fouls beaches in the Okanagan. But, although I have enjoyed hunting chukars and ring-necked pheasants in North America, it was much more of a thrill to see chukars in their native habitats in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan and ring-necked pheasants in the Peoples’ Republic of China. Clearly, aesthetics and values are valid components of the debate, if there is one. Some species just don’t belong here.

I agree with Davis that scientists have become more sanguine about the issue and it is usually non-specialists who have such an anti-invasive fervour. I don’t mind their zeal. In 1994, when I published the first comprehensive analysis of invasive species in this province , there was virtually no government or public attention to the damage caused by invasives. Now there are new laws to restrict importation and government staff, stakeholder committees, and citizens’ groups in every region that sponsor research, conduct campaigns to limit the spread of invasives, and mobilize volunteers to eradicate infestations in certain situations. This is all good for the environment.

Leaving Minnesota, we drove through South Dakota, Nebraska, and Colorado, stopping at state parks and National Grasslands all along the way. We saw pronghorn antelope, more bison, desert cottontails, prairie dogs, and other prairie wildlife in four more short-grass ecozones. Without conservation efforts like those at Blue Mounds State Park, these would have been degraded habitats empty of wildlife.

References
Harding, L.E, P.R. Newroth, R. Smith, M. Waldichuk, P. Lambert and B. Smiley, 1994. Exotic species in British Columbia. In: L.E. Harding and E. McCullum (eds.), 1994. Biodiversity in British Columbia: our changing environment. Environment Canada, Delta, B.C. p. 159-223.
DAVIS, M. 2003. Biotic globalization: does competition from introduced species threaten biodiversity? Bioscience 53:481-489.
World Wildlife Fund 2000, Terrestrial Ecoregions

Grooming and the Evolution of Language

Robin Dunbar’s interesting book, Grooming, gossip and the evolution of language (Dunbar 1996) proposes that language evolved in our primate progenitors as a social bond to promote group cohesion, essentially replacing social grooming. I’m not so sure.

His idea was that social grooming (which in primates goes well beyond that needed for health, for example, to remote ticks and fleas) evolved as societal “glue,” but became inadequate when group sizes became too large. Primate societies are based on relationships, which are usually hierarchical: whom you groom, who grooms you, both determine and demonstrate your place in society, which in turn determines your personal and consequently reproductive success. Hence, it is an evolutionary adaptation. But you can only groom and be groomed by so many partners. Beyond a certain group size, grooming becomes inadequate. Dunbar showed, based on a variety of paleontological, anthropological and physiological data and modern and extinct primates, including humans (for example, predicted group size based on ratio of group size to neocortex in primates) that group sizes grew from about 60 in australopithecines, to 80 in H. habilis, 100-120 in H. erectus, 110-130 in archaic humans, and 120-160 in modern humans. Modern human group size, whether as hunter-gatherers, military legions, or corporate operating units, is amazingly consistent and seems related to the number of people that anyone can know personally.

Anthropologist do generally agree that our brain size grew to primarily accommodate the memory and analytical processing power needed to keep track of all the relationships in increasingly larger groups: from 450 cm3 in A. africanus to 750 cm3 in H. habilis, 1050 cm3 in H. erectus, and 1350 cm3 in H. sapiens (Pilbeam and Gould 1974). However, absolute size is not the whole story: in modern humans, body size was reduced somewhat, while the brain stayed the same or grew a little, meaning that relative brain size continued to increase and the biggest jump in relative brain size was only 100,000 years ago (Kappelman 1996). By Dunbar’s reasoning, therefore group size should have reached its peak then, not in archaic humans. This is, not surprisingly, around the time that most anatomists (if not linguists, who favour a later date) that language with complex evolved.

Dunbar reasoned that since gossip and other social commentary forms the bulk of human conversation—more, for example, that practical matters such as where to hunt kudu or when to propose a corporate merger—that it must have evolved as a replacement for grooming. He dismissed the previous notion, still held by many anthropologists, that language began as a way to communicate practical matters essential to survival, such as how to stalk a dangerous prey or warning of a predator.

But humans have a very different vocalization apparatus, including the shape and position of the hyoid bone, that lets us make a much wider range of sounds than any other primate, and this must have evolved much longer ago than the last 100,000 years. And even monkeys make a sufficiently wide range of vocalizations combined with commonly understood meanings, to give and distinguish among different warning calls for different predators. For example, vervet monkeys (pictured above) and many other colobine monkeys have give warning calls that distinguish among snakes, eagles, and leopards; in mixed species groups, all species of monkeys recognize and respond appropriately to each of the warning calls that the other species give. Surely, the roots of human language are much older than the beginning of larger group sizes.

Here’s how I think language started, and why I think it. Early in my career as a wildlife biologist, I worked with several Inuit and Dene (First Nations aboriginal people of Canada) hunters and trappers and at times camped with their families, few of whom could speak English. But our work required communication, and it was not long before, in each situation, my native counterparts and I knew each other’s words for the common animals we encountered, a few other nouns such as “track”, and a few verbs such as “hunt” and “follow”. Because I could write and kept notes, I perhaps learned these words more quickly than a hunter-gatherer who could not write. But that we learned, and quickly, shows how important in was for us, and how important it must have been for our hunter-gatherer ancestors. But there is more. My colleagues had a lot of gestures that they used to indicate different animals and verbs such as “hunt,” “track.” and “follow.” And the gestures were different from tribe to tribe. For example, Cree men from the Beaver Indian tribe of northwestern Alberta often pointed with their lips. To indicate where a caribou had gone, they would turn their face in that direction and pucker their lips, as if trying to kiss the direction. Clearly, hunters need non-verbal “words” so that they can coordinate a hunt without alerting the prey.

Archaeological evidence suggests that, since both H. neandertalensis and H. sapiens could speak, then their common ancestor, H. heidelbergensis, could, too. Rudimentary speech as described above: nouns describing everyday objects, no doubt dates from that time. Experts are divided as to when grammatical language with syntax developed, but estimates range from 300,000 to 50,000 years ago (see review in Ambrose 2001). This happened long before the development of modern humans.

Recent genetic evidence shows that we lost our hair at least 1.2 MYA(Rogers et al. 2004) , while archaeological evidence shows that we began using scraped hides as clothing about 300,000 years ago, and adopted sewn, well-fitting clothing around 20,000 years ago (see review in Rantala 2007). Language therefore coincides roughly with adoption of clothing, but not with nakedness. Since grooming would have been basically unnecessary for hygiene between 1.2 and 0.3 MYA, and it’s not possible to “groom” naked skin, it seems that Dunbar’s thesis is untenable. No, language started, if not with hunting per se, then with the general need to communicate about the exigencies of life among our ape ancestors who cooperated and coordinated their activities.

References
Ambrose, S. 2001. Paleolithic technology and human evolution. Science 291:1748.
Dunbar, R. 1996. Grooming, gossip and the evolution of language. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusets.
Kappelman, J. 1996. The evolution of body mass and relative brain size in fossil hominids. Journal of Human Evolution 30:243-276.
Pilbeam, D., and S. J. Gould. 1974. Size and scaling in human evolution. Science 186:892-901.
Rantala, M. J. 2007. Evolution of nakedness in Homo sapiens. Journal of Zoology 273:1-7.
Rogers, A. R., D. Iltis, and S. Wooding. 2004. Genetic variation at the MC1R locus and the time since loss of human body hair. Current Anthropology 45:106-108.

Agribusiness not a Panacea for Africa

Many people involved in aid and development programs for Africa think that science and agribusiness can reduce hunger and poverty. Governments, including Canada, promote this. They are wrong. Well, maybe in some hypothetical situation they can, but not in the real world. An example is Margaret Wente’s column about a year ago in The Globe and mail (Enviro-romanticism is hurting Africa, July 18, 2009). She said that in Africa, poverty and malnutrition are rising “largely because of primitive farming practices.” Nothing could be further from the truth. Poverty and malnutrition are rising because, among other factors, bad governance is ruining farmland, bad governments are leasing and selling farmland to foreign firms and governments, and bad international trade is preventing small farmers’ access to markets.

She said, “We could increase the global food supply by 80 per cent just by bringing the rest of the world up to the standards of modern agriculture.” This is pure nonsense. Many analyses of the global food situation, such as that of Lester Brown, “Plan B 3.0 Mobilizing to Save Civilization” (Earth Policy Institute, 2008), make it abundantly clear that global food production is on the decline. The improvements and innovations that gave rise to the “Green Revolution” during 1950–1990—mainly in large-scale irrigation, mass-production and distribution of fertilizers combined with plant breeding—have already been made and no amount of technological development can forestall the decline. Desertification (exacerbated by climate change), salinization of soils because of irrigation, and urban encroachment have reduced the global supply of farmland and rangeland. Water scarcity because of over-pumping of aquifers, over-use and degradation of surface water, and logging and other causes of more rapid runoff and erosion in watersheds are further reducing the amount and productivity of arable land. The world’s ocean catch of wild fish peaked at about 96 million tons in 2000. Aquaculture has allowed continued, modest increases in total fish production, but only at the expense of destruction of destruction of coastal ecosystems, especially mangroves, that support local shore-based fisheries and coastal farming.

Meanwhile, the increasing human population has meant that global per-person food supplies have declined. The wild seafood supply per person peaked at 17 kg in 1988 and now stands at 14 kg. The amount of grainland per person in 1950 was 0.23 ha, but in 2007 was 0.10 ha.

The global food crisis of 2007–2008 that saw food riots in several African countries, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Haiti because of dramatically increasing grain prices portends worsening food security. Today, in September 2010, people are rioting in Mozambique for the same reason.

Driving across Saskatchewan or Kansas, one sees Wente’s “modern agriculture”: vast distances of highly productive monoculture farmland with hardly any people. In our recent drive through four sub-Saharan African countries (Namibia, Botswana, South Africa and Swaziland), we saw a land densely dotted with small villages and single-family huts where people guarded their small herds and flocks, hoed their meagre maize and vegetable plots, and trudged by with heavy loads of firewood and water. Agribusiness may fit into the overall economic mix and productivity of these countries, but will not help the 60% of the population of sub-Saharan Africa who, as Wente notes, are “smallholder farmers, mostly women, who typically earn a dollar a day or less.”

Agribusiness is making their plight worse day by day. The report, “Land grab or development opportunity? Agricultural investments and international land deals in Africa” by the United Nations and the International Institute for Environment and Development, shows that big businesses in rich countries have been buying and leasing farmland in Africa at an alarming rate. Since 2004, governments of five African countries of re-allocated (sold outright or leased in long-term contracts) 2,492,684 ha of land (excluding allocations below 1000 ha) away from smallholders to big business, many of them foreign. They include governments or businessed in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Kuwait, Qatar, India, Britain, South Korea, and China. The rate of farmland reallocation to foreigners has increased dramatically after the 2007–2008 food crisis as countries seek to increase their own food security. In May, the government of Madagascar fell because of a popular uprising against the government’s 99 year leases of almost 1.8 million ha of farmland to South Korean and Indian companies.

The biotechnology that Wendt and many others advocate as a panacea for African hunger is not bad by itself and may be an important part of the mix, but will not help the smallholders and often hurts them. What they need is for rich countries like Canada to tie its international trade and aid in poor countries to only those business deals and programs that help poor families.

Grizzly and Polar Bears Interbreeding is another threat to Polar Bears

It was one of the most awe-inspiring experiences of my wildlife career: in the autumn of 1975 a colleague and I watched a polar bear swim up an inlet toward us on Bathurst Island, then Northwest Territories (now Nunavut). We were near the head of an inlet on a high promontory, and were excited to watch the white bear swim for a mile or so until it reached the shore just below us. There it walked on the the shore and sniffed in the mud where we had walked moments before. We could see him sniffing in our individual footprints. He looked up and around, nose high, testing the wind. Then started following our tracks towards us.

My colleague ran, but since there was nowhere to hide and nothing to climb on the featureless tundra, I stayed put. In a few moments, the bear abandoned our scent trail and went on up the draw, passing out of sight among the rocks.

There are still polar bears throughout the Arctic and some populations are healthy, but some are declining, with low production of cubs and low survival of all age classes. Climate change is the main culprit, but now another threat has appeared.

The confirmation of a grizzly-polar bear hybrid (DNA confirms suspected rare grizzly-polar cross shot in High Arctic, Vancouver Sun, May 1, 2010) at Ulukhaktok, N.W.T, (formerly Holman, on Victoria Island) is part of a trend that began at least 20 years ago.

In the winter of 1951-1952, Frank Banfield, a government wildlife biologist, recorded a grizzly bear taken on Banks Island (Banfield 1974). This was so unusual that he reported it as an “extra-limital record,” that is, outside of the known range.

In the last 19 years, sighting of grizzly bears unusually far north have become common: Melville Sound (1000 km north of mainland) in 1991, Banks and Victoria Islands (160 km north of the mainland), Hudson Bay, and Melville Island in 2003 and again in 2007 (Kaufmann 2007; Struzik 2006). They have become so well established on Victoria Island as to be a significant predator of muskoxen (Gunn and Lee 2000) .
The one shot in May was a second-generation hybrid, the offspring female grizzly-polar hybrid mating with a male grizzly bear. It was the second known grizzly-polar bear hybrid. In April 2006 the first known hybrid polar-grizzly bear in the wild was shot on Banks Island (Roach 2006). DNA tests showed it had a polar bear mother and a grizzly bear father.

After I gave a talk on my grizzly bear research at an international bear conference in 1977, several Norwegian bear researchers rushed up to me. They had read my earlier paper in the Canadian Journal of Zoology on grizzly bear denning on the Arctic coast, in which I mentioned that polar bears also occurred in my study area (Harding 1976). It turned out that this was the first report of grizzly bear and polar bear ranges overlapping, and the Norwegians wanted to know how the two species interacted. Their interest was stimulated because a polar bear and grizzly bear had mated in a zoo and produced fertile offspring (c.f. Stirling 1999), and they wanted to know if this could happen in the wild. I had to disappoint them by explaining that, since polar bears only came ashore in winter when grizzly bears were asleep in their dens, they never had an opportunity to interact, even though they shared the same habitat temporarily.

How times have changed! The recent shrinking of the polar ice cap and withdrawal of seasonal ice from shore has driven many polar bears ashore in the summer, bringing them into contact with coastal grizzly bears. At the same time, more and more grizzly bears are taking up residence on the Arctic Islands. Such hybrids may become more common. Over many generations, this could, hypothetically, destroy the polar bear as a species by genetic contamination. That is, if they aren’t first destroyed by shrinking sea ice seal-hunting habitat.

References

Banfield, A.W.F. 1974. The mammals of Canada. National Museum of Natural Sciences, Univ. of Toronto Press, Ottawa.
Gunn, A., and Lee, J. 2000. distribution and abundance of muskoxen on northeast victoria island, n.w.t., august 1990. Government of the Northwest Territories, Department of Rresources, Wildlife and Economic Development Manuscript Report No. 119.
Harding, L.E. 1976. Den site characteristics of Arctic coastal grizzly bears (Ursus arctos L.) on Richards Islands, Northwest Territories, Canada. Canadian Journal of Zoology 54(8): 1357-1363.
Kaufmann, B. 2007. Grizzly sightings on northern Arctic island.
Roach, J. 2006. Grizzly-polar bear hybrid found -- but what does it mean?
Stirling, I. 1999. Polar Bears. University of Michigan Press.
Struzik, E. 2006. Grizzly bears on ice.

Dog Evolution: Camp Scavenger Hypothesis Denied

The photo of a Tundra Wolf first appeard in BC Outdoors, April, 1985. An abbreviated version of this post was published as a Letter to the Editor in the November/December 2010 issue of Archaeology.

In the September/October 2010 issue of Archaeology is an article, "More than Man’s Best Friend,” that summarizes theories about how dogs' domestication began. All dogs descended from wolves, although the exact location and hence subspecies of wolf is in doubt: some evidence points to China and some to the Middle East. One of these ideas is that wolves evolved as scavengers, hanging around human camps. Anyone who has lived in wolf country as I have would find this untenable. Wolves don't scavenge, unless they're starving, or if they opportunistically stumble upon another predator's kill. And human camps don't usually leave enough meaty refuse to attract a wolf, although they often visit camps out of curiosity. A hunting camp is a different matter: a large mammal carcass would attract a wolf; but humans have been using tools to clean meat from bones for more than 2 million years, and by about 15,000 years ago, when the first unequivocal dogs appear in the archaeological record, humans were very efficient at cleaning up the bones and extracting the marrow. The leftovers would not feed even one wolf, let alone a pack. Human settlements leave enough refuse; but these only appear about 10,000, just before agriculture.

Moreover, anyone who thinks the first dogs evolved as camp-periphery scavengers hasn’t spent enough time sleeping on bare ground where large carnivores might eat you. They can’t know the terror one feels upon hearing heavy footsteps in the dark after the campfire has died; nor can they realize how easy it is to obtain wolf pups. I have many times heard such footsteps and wished I had brought my dog, and later found grizzly bear or other predator prints. Once the footsteps stopped only a few meters away, and stayed. I lay petrified until the first light of dawn revealed a mountain lion watching me. In the Canadian Arctic and Boreal Forest, where I have worked as a biologist, hunted, and camped with Dene and Inuit and hunters and families for many years, every hunter finds wolf dens and many bring home the pups for the kids to play with. I’m too large to crawl into the wolf dens I have found, but the more lightly-built Dene hunters often can. It would not take long—about one night—for a family to realize how good a sentry the wolf can be. If it is a bitch that they have tamed, she’ll likely be bred by a wild wolf. It is not a great leap to think that the family will keep the most docile of the brood. From there to dogs is a short chain. In the Middle East, one of the places posited for dogs’ first progenitors, even into the last century there were wolves, lions, leopards, brown bears, striped hyenas, and wild boar, all of which can kill sleeping humans. After dogs were domesticated, sure, some no doubt became camp scavengers, but I feel in my bones, where terror lives, that they began as pets and sentries.