How Dogs Make Us Ancient Again

And how they help us adapt our ancient minds to the modern world

Carson

“…with a look that reserved for me alone

all his sweet and shaggy life,

always near me, never troubling me,

and asking nothing.”

— Pablo Neruda

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It is significant that we domesticated dogs before we domesticated wheat, and that we filled our camps with puppies before we filled our fields with fig trees and grape vines.

Let us imagine a Siberian some twenty-three thousand years ago.¹ Glaciers cover a fourth of all land on earth. Men and women share cold pockets of land undominated by ice with another predator – an ancestor of the gray wolf.  

The Siberian man steps from his mammoth-bone hut. A stream of black smoke spirals out of its chimney and the smell of cooked meat drifts across evergreens and snow-capped hills.

He sits down on a log beside a fire pit with a few red embers still glowing from the night prior, and tosses a dried strip of mammoth meat a few feet away. He pulls a block of ivory out of his thick fur coat and begins to whittle away at it with a sharpened rock. Glancing up beneath his brows, he sees yellow eyes beneath the eaves. “The same place as always,” he muses to himself.

The wolf has been coming more often. First the yellow eyes, then the grey fur emerges from the forest, and the wolf begins its flanking approach around the man while sniffing the air and watching him out of the corner of his eyes. This is the strange wolf. The friendly wolf. The man feels a sense of lightness that he does not understand.

What followed? Not long after we became friends with the yellow-eyed wolf, it seems we crossed east over the Bering land bridge into the Americas and west over the fields of Europe, veering north and south at points along the way. Where we went, our dogs went too. The Siberian with the bit of woolly mammoth meat may have simply wanted to make friends with this spark of life sharing this lonely rock in the cosmos. Though he did not know it, he may have kicked off the coevolution of Homo sapiens and Canis familiarus.  

I imagine there is a reason why dogs can read our facial expressions², why they know what it means when we point our finger but not our elbow³, why the slightest twitch of Carson’s eyebrow is enough for me to say “good boy” as if he is suffering terribly and needs me to lift his spirits⁴, and why we get a boost of feel-good oxytocin when we gaze into our dogs eyes which, some claim, means the human-dog relationship is akin to the mother-infant relationship.⁵

But these are matters of the body as opposed to the soul. My hunch is that there exists a deeper truth of our relationship. What then can we learn about ourselves from our ancient friends? What too can they teach us about our modern mode of life?

What happens today? Life is no longer as minimalist as it once was. Instead of hurling spears at mammoth, roasting meat over a fire, and sleeping the sleep of the dead, we worry about the results of elections that can influence the rest of our lives but which lie outside of our control in this moment. Instead of gratitude for a well-chiseled arrowhead and wooden fire-starter, we hear talk of recessions and depressions that can delete our digital savings but which lie outside of our control in this moment. Instead of a deep satisfaction from surviving to sunset answerable to none but the moon, we can enter the void of the internet that incessantly babbles about apocalypse and the extinction of our species and of our earth but which also lies outside of our control in this very moment.

Our survival has changed from second-to-second demands to forty-year plans, but our brains are the same. Our tribes of dozens bonded by love and blood have become billions split by pixels and digits, but our physiological needs are the same. Our technology has changed from masterfully crafted blades to liquid crystal displays, but the demands of our souls are the same.

My sense is that the modern world has developed radically faster than our ancient minds. We are more likely to glide into the bone-hut mode of life like a knife in a sheath than for the Siberian man to glide into our glowing-screen mode of life. But we and the dog have, for the most part, remained the same. This means that one of the only constants between who we were twenty-thousand years ago and who we are today is the dog. The Pointer, Dachshund, and Husky are the anchors of our humanity. Dogs makes us ancient, and in doing so they regulate our modern mode of life.

For my part, every worry, stress, and fear evaporates from my mind when I look into Carson’s eyes of copper flecked with green. It is my strong belief that a small chunk of Epictetus exists in each of our four-legged monsters. Carson asks me telepathically, “Of all the things you are worried about, are any within your control at this moment?” I answer that they are not. Carson then says, “Then rid your skull of it. Now tell me, is it within your control to be right here, right now, and to sit beside me, or is it not? To drop your phone, or not? To shut your laptop, or not?” I answer that it is.

Dogs reduce the complexity of modern life down to a single choice: either I am present in this moment or I am not.   

They also calm emotions like a Balm of Gilead. When we are sad, will we feel better doomscrolling news feeds or when cuddling a Shih Tzu? When we are worn-out, will we feel better drinking ourselves into oblivion or nuzzling a Dalmatian? And what do we do with combat veterans with a bit of trauma? What else do we do but give them a Yellow Labrador? Just so with those who suffer from addiction, or those who are lonely, or those children unafflicted by the weighty matters of adulthood who simply want to pet the random mutt strutting down the street as if it were a gift sent down by God for their instant gratification.

It is of interest that the maximalism of the modern world is predicated on the destruction of the minimalism of the ancient. The dog takes us back to the era of minimalism: a stone-ringed fire and a warm bone-hut, an elk-skin coat and a God-given mutt. The dog does not give a damn about the era of maximalism: the letters after our name or what so-and-so said of us, the car we can afford or the mindless media’s fuss. Our dogs are speaking to us from twenty-thousand years ago. I believe we should listen to them.

The dog reveals a truth of the human condition: we are neither our cravings and aversions nor our hopes and fears. In any given moment, we are nothing more than what we see when we gaze into the eyes of our dogs: calm, devotion, loyalty, love, and presentness. The rest is, at best, a luxury to be enjoyed, and, at worst, a distraction from what actually matters in the time we have been given.

I do not know what the world will look like in another twenty thousand years, but it is legitimate, I think, to make a prophesy in two parts: for as long as we remain human, dogs will remain by our side, and for as long as dogs remain by our side, we will remain human.

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1. Perri, Angela R et al. “Dog domestication and the dual dispersal of people and dogs into the Americas.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America vol. 118,6 (2021): e2010083118. doi:10.1073/pnas.2010083118

2. Müller, Corsin A et al. “Dogs can discriminate emotional expressions of human faces.” Current biology : CB vol. 25,5 (2015): 601-5. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2014.12.055

3. Lakatos, Gabriella et al. “A comparative approach to dogs' (Canis familiaris) and human infants' comprehension of various forms of pointing gestures.” Animal cognition vol. 12,4 (2009): 621-31. doi:10.1007/s10071-009-0221-4

4. Kaminski, Juliane et al. “Evolution of facial muscle anatomy in dogs.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America vol. 116,29 (2019): 14677-14681. doi:10.1073/pnas.1820653116

5. Nagasawa, Miho et al. “Social evolution. Oxytocin-gaze positive loop and the coevolution of human-dog bonds.” Science (New York, N.Y.) vol. 348,6232 (2015): 333-6. doi:10.1126/science.1261022