Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
simply living of the land to the acquisition of a far more predictable source
of meat and textiles and entirely new food resources like milk and cheese.
There were also evolutionary changes in the people who domesticated
the animals. These changes were driven, not directly by the domestication of
animals and plants, but by the resulting alterations to the ecological niches
that we occupy throughout the planet. As we saw in the previous chapter,
recent evolutionary changes in our species have been driven by a feedback
loop involving our environment, our genes, our bodies, and our behaviors.
The domestication of animals dramatically altered all aspects of the human
environment, irreversibly changing important components of this feedback
loop. We will see, in this and the following chapters, how such feedback pro-
cesses have shaped ourselves and our world.
How dogs were domesticated
As we returned from the petroglyph canyon to await the eclipse, we stum-
bled into a time warp that took us back to one of the most important of those
early domestication events.
Our guide Tugso Tugso got word that a boy in one of the villages had
found a wolf cub. We detoured to the tiny village of Oench, a cluster of mud-
walled houses scattered along a dusty riverbed that cut across the truck route
from the Chinese border. There the boy proudly showed of the little six-
week-old cub that he had found abandoned in its mother's lair. There was no
sign of what had happened to the mother.
The cub belonged to the wolf subspecies
Canis lupus chanco
, which is dis-
tributed across Asia from Kazakhstan to Korea. His eyes were brown rather
than the intense yellow that forms such a striking feature of North Ameri-
can wolves. He was determinedly gnawing on a bone, and from his pos-
sessive attitude it would have been extremely unwise for us to of er him a
friendly fi nger.
What would happen to this cub? We did not know, but other cubs that
had been found by the children of the village over the years were raised for a
short while and then released when they were no longer puppies.
