The Wolf In My House

     Around 130,000 years ago Neanderthals first domesticated a Eurasian wolf, which made perfect sense because they were both carnivores. Unlike HomoSapiens Sapiens (modern humans) the Neanderthals exclusively ate meat, and required more than 6,000 calories per day, at least 3 times as much as modern humans. For the next hundred thousand years in Europe, Western Asia and the Middle East, the Neanderthals and their wolves dominated, hunting and eating everything they could.

     Starting around 30,000 years ago, HomoSapiens Sapiens started to overlap into the territories in Europe and the Middle East dominated by the Neanderthals. Over the next 10,000 years, we killed the Neandertals, interbred with them, and took their dogs, which descended to become all large dogs without curly tails, and by around 20,000 years ago Neanderthals disappeared from the fossil record. The Eurasian wolf that was domesticated by the Neanderthals no longer exists in nature, because all of them were domesticated by the Neanderthals to become their dogs.

     Then around 12,000 years ago somewhere in the Arabian peninsula, Arabian desert wolves started hanging around near human settlements and transformed into village dogs that followed the humans wherever they went all around the world. Some of them were domesticated by people in the Middle East, and by 8,000 years ago as Meltwater Pulse 1C raised the ocean levels by 21 ft or 6.5 meters in less than 150 years, everyone turned their houses into boats and became the Sea Peoples of the Mediterranean, spreading the small domesticated dogs with curly tails all around the world. Unlike the ancestor of the larger dogs which no longer exists in nature, the Arabian desert wolf still exists, and weighs about 60 to 80 lb.

     Over the next 5,000 years, people bred dogs into three distinct sizes, large and medium for hunting, and a small dog to be a companion for women and children, as are depicted in the mosaic pictures found in Minoan houses. In modern times the dogs have been turned into many pure breeds, but 2/3 of the dogs on the planet are still village dogs, essentially semi-domesticated Arabian desert wolves. Not much different from the Arabian wolf that still lives in the Arabian desert, just a little smaller, averaging about 50 lb. Village dogs currently live on every continent except for Antarctica.

     All of the small dogs with curly tails are descended from the desert wolves, and many of the medium dogs are as well, while all large dogs come from the wolves that the Neanderthals domesticated 130,000 years ago. While you can breed dogs of any sizes together, before humans got involved the last time the Arabian desert wolf and the now extinct ancestor of large dogs had a common ancestor was over 800,000 years ago. Which may help to explain why small dogs are typically so aggressive towards large breeds, they may not even see them as the same species.