BY HARRY WEEKES
For Christmas, we added another miniature dachshund to our family. This comes at a time when my students are exploring the world of wolves.
As you can imagine, sitting with a four-pound dog, who stands three inches at the shoulders, and runs about two miles an hour, makes the idea of how we got from a 125 pound, two and a half foot tall, 30 plus miles an hour sprinter particularly stark.
When I imagine our human ancestors walking into Europe, it’s even more comical, and seemingly harder to figure out.
Here was a band of upright animals without serious teeth (at least not in the predatorial sense), skin so thin they couldn’t survive outside in the winter without some accommodation, and virtually no ability to run, as least from a wolf’s perspective.
In the First Contact scenario, I imagine the wolves simple used one of their already existing words for us and barked out the equivalent of “Hey look, snacks.”
Think about wolves’ main food- elk and other deer. At this ancestral time, we are talking about animals that routinely weighed over 500 pounds, lived in groups, had thick hides, and specialized in running.
The main danger of history, of course, is reading it backwards, so I work to figure out what those first humans entering Europe had going for them. What was their story?
Humans were latecomers to the scene, and as such, the niche open to us was incredibly restricted. While it’s not even close to this simplistic, it was as though the ecosystem gave our early ancestors this design challenge: “You want to grow up and become your own species? Great. Here is what you get: Tropical Africa during the day.” Sounds awesome, right? Except, you currently live in the trees, don’t really know what walking is much less running, and are covered in a hair-suit that is simply a bad fashion choice in the sun.
Time and the pure stubbornness associated with the will to survive and reproduce can do some fantastic things, though. After a couple of million years, you can walk around and even find strength in a kind of Meerkat-style observation of the plains. Running is great but not necessary if we stick together and coordinate our defenses and attacks. Hair? Well, it can be moved around over time, and there are other ways to stay warm when we need it.
And it was this version of us that walked into Europe. Directed by several million years to survive well together and turn our weaknesses into strengths.
What would it have been like for the first pack of wolves to charge a band of humans….and have the humans immediately huddle into a tight group, turn a bunch of sharpened sticks outward, and quickly make a series of continuous vocalizations that coordinated their movement?
Just think of what you would do if you ran at a flock of pigeons and instead of flying, they aggregated into a big pigeon ball and came at you? I, for one, would think twice.
And what if these pesky people kept showing up after you killed one of the other animals that is so big you can’t really eat it all? And what if they also had the ability to do the same, so occasionally you could eat what they killed, too? Hmmmm. A begrudging reciprocity.
There a thousand other steps to consider between those first interactions and domestic dogs. But like they say, a thousand-mile journey starts with a single step. I think I am about four steps in- the approximate length of 10 or so miniature dachshunds.
Harry Weekes is the founder and head of school at The Sage School in Hailey. This is his 52nd year in the Wood River Valley, where he lives with Hilary and one of their three baby adults—Simon. The other members of the flock are Georgia and Penelope (Georgia recently fledged from Davidson College in North Carolina and Penelope is at Middlebury College in Vermont).