Who let the dogs IN?
The domestication of dogs, the pitfalls of academia, mythological castration, and practical archaeology with David Ian Howe 🏹
Hello and merry Tuesday. We’re changing things up a tad this week, I’m bringing you an interview with one of my favourite public-facing archaeologists who I’ve been instagram-pals with from the very beginning (six years ago, sweet lord). David Ian Howe is a sensational anthropologist, comedian, and science communicator who has a podcast, YouTube series, and also possibly the best sense of humour I’ve ever encountered. I’m really not a fan of Instagram reels but I make an exception for his.
Read on for a bullshit-free discussion about academia, archaeology, the domestication of dogs, mythological castration, and the cess-pit that is social media. I learnt a LOT and I hope you do too (I’ve trimmed the transcript of our chat for the sake of clarity and brevity as the ‘reading time’ originally clocked in at 33 minutes — it’s still quite meaty but scroll for some very sweet rock art of two mammoths intertwining their trunks 🦣🦣).
Why do you think public facing archaeology is so important?
So much of academia is behind a paywall. Obviously I think people should be professionally trained in archaeology and history and know how to think critically and all that. But often when I hear people lecturing about archaeology or classics it's a bit of a snooze-fest. If you can't summarise your whole thesis or dissertation into an Instagram post then you shouldn't be doing it. You should be able to distill it down and make it easy for people to understand because everybody has a right to learn about our shared past.
How did we domesticate dogs? How did it happen?
The quickest way to explain it would be that humans leave Africa twice and we get to Eurasia, where we probably learnt how to hunt the different fauna out there from watching wolves do it. Especially up in Siberia/East Asia, it got glaciated so humans were stuck there. And wolves, as an apex predator, had to adapt to this new invasive species that was also efficient at hunting the same prey. Wolves kind of won darwinism to me in the sense that they just realised, oh, the humans can do all the hunting, we can just eat scraps and lay around their camp and warn them when tigers are coming. Another possibility is that when wolves would come near humans or try to attack, they'd kill the aggressive ones but keep the more docile ones. Either way, dogs were coming in, or rather wolves were coming in close proximity to humans, and some kind of either artificial or natural selection was happening. And dogs exist because they are a niche of the wolf that has adapted to life among homo sapiens.
How long did the period of domestication last? If there's any way of even knowing that?
It's hard to say bone-wise. But genetics wise, we know dogs existed—i.e. they had a similar genetic signature to our modern domestic dogs—around 20,000 years ago. But I would definitely, confidently say it was going on probably 10,000 years or so before that.
Damn. So 30,000 years?
I'd say so. And modern humans, we come in around 50,000 years ago? So that tracks.
Could you talk a bit about the domestication of dogs compared to other species? Is there a way of understanding the domestication of dogs within the framework of domestication more broadly?
Dogs are the first to be domesticated while we were hunter gatherers, which is the main difference, because they can be as mobile as us and they eat exactly the same diet as we do, or at least can exist on it. They didn't require too much effort to domesticate, whereas for goats, sheep, cows and all that, you’d need dogs to help corral them and help hunt and scare them into a position where you can rope them and put them in a pen. I'm sure people did it without dogs in certain places, but it would make sense to me that dogs helped with that. It also comes down to pastoralism versus agriculture. You need to be able to move across large distances to feed your goats and cows. And that's what a pastoralist does. But in an agricultural society you have to have enough food surplus to feed a bunch of goats, cows, and pigs. So I would say the Neolithic period marked a huge shift in how domestication worked because then you had the time to domesticate all these other animals, but also the extra food and calories to do so because you weren't constantly moving around from place to place.
Cats versus dogs? I'm wondering if you have anything to say about our historical relationship with the two pets and how their biology and attributes have affected our historical relationship with them?
I would say, right off the bat, dogs and cats are the only domestic carnivores. All the other animals are poultry or ungulates.
Real quick, what's an ungulate?
An ungulate is a hoofed, four legged animal, like a cow, sheep, or horse. But cats and dogs are domestic carnivores, which means we're more related to them than other domesticated animals. Any animal in carnivora is a very social animal because it has to exist in a pack or group to hunt. So that allows cats and dogs to basically pick up on human social cues way better than other animals do.
When it comes to cats, I mean, you've been to Greece, right? There are cats everywhere. I noticed that in Jerusalem too, hordes of them. They're from the fertile crescent and Egypt. So once we had all that extra grain lying around, rats came. And then cats came to eat the rats. There's an argument to be made about whether cats are even domesticated. Are they just a wild animal that kind of hung around? I think they're domesticated by this point in terms of their sociality with us. Obviously, dogs are a little more social with humans because they're specifically bred to be. But cats can vocalize. They look at you and talk to you just like a dog does. And that's because they’re carnivores. They're carnivoreans, I should say.
What about the mythology of cats and dogs?
I'm not too familiar with cat mythology. I know in ancient Egypt there was a cat God and a dog God. I forget the cat one. But Anubis, the jackal, is the God of the dead. There are a couple of theories that he's an amalgamation of all the canid creatures that existed there. So dogs, wolves, and jackals. When you die you meet Anubis and he takes you through a sort of orientation. It's interesting to me that when you die, you meet a dog, and then he tests whether you were a good or bad person with that scale. It's neat that a dog does that. And the other Egyptian gods, from what I understand, are somewhat antagonistic towards humans. But Anubis is friendly. And he was the first to mummify somebody. He mummified Osiris when he was cut to pieces. Or was it Set? Whatever. The one Isis cuts up.
I feel like something weird happens with his penis, or maybe I'm getting my mythologies confused.
He gets cut up and they find all the pieces except for his penis, and then Anubis, being a dog, manages to find it.
I've never thought about the fact that dogs and cats are the only domesticated carnivores but that makes so much sense. Now that we're down the mythology road, I want to talk about that giant wolf in Norse mythology whose name is escaping me right now.
Fenrir.
Do you have any thoughts or opinions? Mine are based off of Marvel and that show Vikings.
I think in the second or third Thor movie the Hulk fights Fenrir, which is pretty cool to see.
So Fenrir, Loki’s son, threatens to eat the world whole so he’s bound in dwarven chains. A guy named Tyr tricks Fenrir, the dwarves make these chains that are made from the footsteps of a cat, the breath of a fish, weird riddle type things. And Tyr puts the chains on him and says I bet you can't break out of this. And Fenrir is like, oh, I totally can. But he can't. And because Tyr tricked him, Fenrir tells him to his hand in his mouth, assuring him he won’t bite it off. Tyr sticks his hand in his mouth and Fenrir, of course, immediately bites it clean off. They end up putting a sword in his mouth so he can't close his jaws. But at Ragnarok, the sword comes out of his mouth, the chains break and he and his sons eat the world.
It's an interesting counterpoint to Anubis, right? Rather than a lovely dog God that's being very kind to humans, we have one that is terrifying and needs to be chained up.
Now I want to talk to you about the Warren mammoth site. How was excavating mammoth bones? I'm so jealous.
That was one of the coolest things I've ever taken part in. A rancher was digging a well with a big backhoe and this huge, round thing popped out. At first he thought it was a rock but he quickly figured out it was some kind of bone. The university came out and took a carbon date below it. Apparently, a stone tool was found on the surface quite near the bone so we wanted to figure out if it was butchered or hunted by people, because that would’ve been happening right around that time. So that's why it wasn't excavated by palaeontologists, because it was in an archaeological time period, but we found no evidence of stone tools whatsoever. It appears that the mammoth just died face down, ass up, in a riverbank. We extended the excavation because bones just kept appearing (it was really well preserved because of the type of sediment that was on top of it). There were probably about 15-20 of us digging, squatting and essentially playing twister. We had to manoeuvre ourselves around the bones because someone's excavating the rib cage while your butt is right up against someone that's working on the skull. It was a mess. But we got it done.
Have you had any experience with experimental archaeology? The closest I get is forcing people to drink out of a replica kylix at a dinner party.
That was actually my PhD thesis. I definitely was drinking, but not experimentally. From around 13,000 years ago the Americas start getting populated by humans, and they were using these big, giant projectile points, as big as my hand. As time goes on and the ice age ends, all the megafauna disappear. The projectile points seem to get smaller, which probably reflects that. But they might have just found more efficient ways to flint nap them using less stone. From 13,000 to 1,000 years ago, all the points gradually get smaller and smaller. A thousand years ago they get to what you’d think a normal arrowhead would be for a good 600 years until the Europeans arrive. But my thesis was about why do they get really small at that time and not get any smaller or bigger? The answer I knew going in was that it’s because the bow and arrow was invented or introduced at that time. But it's also when agriculture spreads from Central America; you have more people fighting over land so you probably need more bows and arrows to fight people than an atlatl or a woomera. So I had replica points made of every size from gigantic to a regular, modern arrowhead. And I shot them into ballistics gel from a bow.
The bow stayed in one position, so it was a constant. The only variable was the size of the points. I tested how deep they penetrated the gel, how fast they flew, and their accuracy on the target. At a certain point size, around 3000 years ago, the efficiency starts to get better. So at that point, the bow could have been invented and they were experimenting with smaller and smaller points or maybe the bow was still only invented a thousand years ago. Anything that was arrowhead sized or a little bit bigger penetrated pretty well into the ballistics gel so it seems that smaller points are more effective with a bow. But at the end of the day, my work proved that larger projectile points can be fired from a bow and arrow i.e. didn't have to be thrown on a spear. My thesis argued that it is possible that the bow was here the whole time (the last 3,000 years), but there's no way to know because the absence of evidence isn't evidence.
I’m glad I threw that question in there because it's been an interest of mine for years. I was a part of this dig in Greece a while back, and they were flint napping in front of us. It was awesome.
Napping's another thing, too. When you hear that sound, I mean it’s not even a theory of mine, it's just the fact that due to 3 million years of evolution in your brain, it’s something you're used to. So it gives you that ASMR feeling when you hear it.
I know it sounds silly to say the sound makes me feel safe in some weird, primal way, but it does.
It’s calming.
Do you have any advice for people wanting to get into public facing academia or, more specifically, public facing archaeology and anthropology? And your advice can be to run away…
Please. Do accounting, do anything else.
Go get a useful degree.
My actual advice would be don't shy away from presenting, take all the opportunities and practice you can get. When you’re writing in an academic context, try to keep in mind how you’d turn it into a script for a video. I did stand up for a while which helped that side of things. I mean, you don't have to do stand up or improv, but getting out there and practicing being social and thinking off the cuff really helps.
Our world can become increasingly insular the further you move through it. People get more and more narrow and niche which makes communication even harder, because if you're only talking to the people in your faculty, you end up getting funnelled into such a niche.
That's a really good point. Figure out how you’d pitch it in an elevator to a random non-expert. Get good at that.
I pitched a book idea to my boyfriend, who wasted no time in telling me it was boring as fuck and no one would read it. And he was right.
I went on a whole soliloquy about stone tools to my girlfriend in college and she was quite vocal about her complete lack of interest. But back to advice, don't be afraid to publicly speak. I know that's hard. Maybe take a public speaking class in college if you need to. Podcasting seems to be one of the most popular formats these days—I wouldn't say get on some podcasts to practice because it's not that easy, but just think about it. As for social media, it's a lot harder than it looks. It's a lot of work.
It looks so easy.
Some people make it look extremely easy. People with big channels, they’ve got a whole team and it’s a full on production. Ultimately if you think it's good, post it. Don't worry about what other people think. And I know everyone says don't read your comments, but we all read our comments. Don't let the metrics bog you down at first, but you will obsessively check them and that's okay.
I do want to know what has been your worst encounter on the Internet? Because it is the trenches out there.
The amount of people that just bluntly ask for nudes or feet pictures is insane. It’s usually men and I'm very straight, so it's flattering, but I can't, you know, reciprocate. In terms of comments, as I said before you're told not to read them because it'll ruin your mental health. But sometimes I do read them because it's constructive criticism. I posted something about the role of women in prehistoric society. 90% of the comments were overwhelmingly positive, from both men and women. And then there was the 10% that said this is incredibly sexist. I read those because I wanted to make sure I wasn't being sexist. That was when I finally learned there's always going to be someone who has an issue with a post. Over on TikTok if I post about Mesoamerica, the Aztecs or Mayans, I’ll get comments saying we shouldn't listen to this coloniser about our history. I guess I could just not post about it so no one learns about it.
Then you're dick for not posting about it.
Right? At least I tried. All you can do is say next time I'll be better. I will pronounce that differently. You want to please people, and you want to make sure you're being a good scientist and communicator. So if people are upset with you, listen, but you can't please everyone, particularly on TikTok. YouTube has an older audience, and they'll come at you with a more conservative argument. And Instagram's the nice middle ground.
Instagram is more chill but I find that TikTok is a lot more anonymous. People's lives are so much more inbuilt to their Instagram, so if they’re saying wild stuff it's a way bigger problem. But for most people on TikTok, they're just a username so they can just rain down on whoever.
That's a really good point and they really do. It can be ruthless, too. There's a person behind the account, so go easy when you're chewing them out.
A real person who is spending their free time trying to educate because they want to be generous with what they've learned.
What kind of stuff do you get, if you don't mind me asking?
I don't mind at all. Lots of creepy dudes. But, and this isn't me trying to victim blame myself or anything like that, a lot of my content is quite sexual. Also when your face is in it, it feeds that parasocial side of things. People really feel like they know you and particularly men expect your time and attention. When I first started I experienced this really funny niche of it—because I was talking about archaeology and history I got the creepy dudes, but the dudes didn't think they were creepy because they also loved history or were super into ancient Rome or whatever. There was this shared interest legitimising their efforts. Rather than just random men DMing a model, saying show me your tits, it was more like, oh my God, that's so crazy about Zeus (now that I have your attention, please show me your tits).
If you’ve made it this far, thank you (!!) and thank you to David for being an informative DELIGHT!
I’m really such a fan of him and all he does, check out his website and socials if you’re keen to learn more:
Xxx
This was great. I love Q&A posts. You get two smart people for the price of one! (Also I didn’t know that flint knapping was called flint knapping. So yay learning!)
This was super interesting!!!