The Thin Gray Line: Wolves, Dogs and Human Perceptions

Debate exists concerning early relationships between humans and wolves. Knowledge from Indigenous Peoples is not employed in scholarly examinations of “domestic dog” origins. Tribes describe wolves as guides, protectors, or entities that showed humans how to hunt. and always argue against wolf-killing by Europeans, up to the present. Although “dogs” anatomically different from wolves have appeared as long ago as 30,000 ybp, this does not mean that peoples holding to hunter-gatherer traditions did not continue to maintain positive social relationships with wolves until recent times. This reciprocal relationship involves both species providing food, which is important because some scholars from the Eurocentric tradition argue that wolves associated with humans to scavenge or hang around waiting for scraps and were dominated by humans.  I argue for a co-evolutionary reciprocal relationship that may have existed for as long as 100,000 years and continues to this day in some cultures.