Despite the partial skeleton shown above, this is not a Halloween post — I just thought the German name for this dog sounded very cool — yes, it was a dog, when researchers finally collected all the pieces they could find and put them together.
In English, that is the Dog of Bonn-Oberkassel. Its bones are red because it was found buried with two human skeletons below a rock that quarry workers eventually uncovered; police were called — wait.
This is sounding a little macabre so let’s cut to the chase: all three individuals had lived in about 12,000 BC and all three — two humans and a dog whose bones show that it had been a very sick but well cared for doggy most of its life — had been buried ceremonially, covered with red pigments.
Why? Well, that’s part of the riddle and I can’t find much more information than what’s in this video.
This post gives you context.
That reconstructed hund shown in the video is better than anything I could do but Wikipedia’s imagery is more evocative:
Our friend, the Indian wolf, top, by Dhaval Vargiya via Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 4.0; Persian Saluki (bottom) by Arman Torkzaban via Wikimedia, public domain.
The Wikipedia article captions that image this way: “The estimated height and weight of the Bonn–Oberkassel dog suggest a build similar to West Asian wolves (such as the Indian wolf), or some modern sighthounds, such as the Saluki.”
There really is no satisfying closing to this Dog Day Saturday Afternoon post — only questions galore. If you are curious, these papers are a good place to start; some of them even have PDF links at the bottom of the page so you can read the whole paper.
In the meantime, it’s good to have met — however uncomprehendingly — what some experts believe to be the oldest known archaeological evidence for the dog-human domestic connection.
And it’s always good to have a little lagniappe:
Featured image: Don Hitchcock via Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Flight To Wonder 