© Peter Watson 2017 Numerous investigators have made the point that hunter-gatherers had overlapping ecological niches with wolves. ‘Both were social species that hunted for many of the same prey items. Wolves, as opportunistic scavengers, may have learned to be aware of human hunting activities and to scavenge from human kills. Perhaps humans even learned to do the same with wolves.’ It is also the case that wolves and people are very similar in habits, social structure and hierarchical organization. All of which would have made domestication relatively easy. Given this overlap, Darcy Morley, an anthropologist who has worked all over the world with dogs, argues that given that many ancient peoples had regular contact with wolves, it is logical to suppose that, at some point, young wolf pups were found by humans and adopted (for dogs and wolves the crucial period for imprinting and bonding is three to eight weeks of life). It has also been suggested that varieties of wolves actually joined human groups, acting as scavengers, and then automatically became domesticated. This may particularly have been true once humans started settling in villages. Whatever the exact reason, dog domestication was in place at around 11,000 BC, and this date, as we shall see, is crucial. The fact of the matter is that wolves and humans co-existed for thousands of years but dogs didn’t appear until relatively late. Darcy Morley, and others who have studied the matter, tell us there are no dogs in cave art. And this puts a different gloss on the trajectory of domestication, a trajectory that is central to my argument. Traditionally, domestication of plants and animals (in that order) has been put at 9,000- 8,500 BC for plants, and 8,500-7,000 BC for animals. Animals followed plants by about a thousand years, but the process had basically been conceived as a single event. When you think about it, however, plant domestication and animal domestication are quite different from one another, except in their results, that people have control over the breeding of other organisms. Plants need time underground, when they transform from seed to shoot; animals lead all their lives above ground but the new animals (in the case of mammals) develop inside the mature ones. A hidden process occurs in both cases, but in totally different locations. Would early peoples have made this fairly abstract conceptual link? Unlikely.