Folks sometimes ask during the school year, “What are you reading?”

They expect me to reel off a long list of titles with short critical assessments.

That is not the answer they get.

“Right now, nothing.”

This is always true except for long holidays breaks like winter or spring breaks. Otherwise I am reading and rereading material for class. Don’t get me wrong. The stuff is great such as Jane Eyre and O Pioneers! But I have time for nothing else between class prep and grading.

But I just finished a book I have been wanting to read for over a year called The Invaders: How Humans and Their Dogs Drove Neanderthals to Extinction by Pat Shipman. It was published in 2015, and I read a review of it in the Minneapolis/St. Paul newspaper. It sounded fascinating.

Last week I used the Haverford Township Free Library website to request the book (I have decided to try not to buy any books after performing Kon-Mari cleansing on my shelves). They had it ready in just a couple days for pick up. Public libraries are so wonderful.

I finished the book last night and it was a great introduction to current ideas, research, excavations, and theories about the evolution of Homo sapiens and Neanderthals. It seems that they coexisted in Europe for between 2,600 – 5,400 years about 40,000 years ago. Modern humans arrived in Europe from Africa about 44,000 years ago.

Shipman does not say the humans went to war and killed the Neanderthals. She rather argues that the humans were more successful at acquiring food, had a more varied diet, and used living tools — wolf-dogs.

She calls us “the most invasive species that has ever lived,” because when we come into an area flora and fauna are destroyed as we take over. Based on archaeological records, we drove to extinction the following types of apex carnivores: two types of bears, large cats, cave hyenas, dholes, and Neanderthals. We also killed off lots of different herbivores: red elk, giant deer, wooly rhinos, and mammoths. We are particularly to blame for the mammoths based on the multitude of mammoth megasites from the Gravettian period (32,000 to 15,000 years ago). Here there were so many a mammoth bones that humans used the bones to build huts. No wonder the mammoths went extinct. Apparently at the Neanderthal sites there were not nearly as many mammoth bones. So how did the humans do it?

Shipman posits that some humans managed to sufficiently domesticate wolves through genetic breeding and training at 2-4 weeks of age, that they used the wolf-dogs’ superior noses, ears, speed, and numbers to locate, track down, keep in place, and help kill the larger prey animals like mammoths. Her evidence is fascinating and draws from a wide array of sources.

First, the skulls of these early dogs are different from wolves and more like modern dogs with a wider brain pan and shorter muzzle.

Second, dogs are found buried in graves starting about 30,000 years ago. There was even one dog buried with a mammoth bone in his mouth.

Third, dog canine teeth were often found with holes drilled in them for use as pendants. Maybe the teeth were used to designate the wearer as one of the People of the Wolf.

Fourth, neither humans nor wolf-dogs are found depicted in cave art from 32,000 years ago.

Fifth, unlike Neanderthals, humans killed lots of wolves as evidenced by skulls. Sometimes they were filleted for food as attested by nicks in the bones and sometimes just skinned for the hide. Shipman suggests the humans killed the wolves to protect their wolf-dogs from attack. Very interesting idea.

Sixth, humans have white sclera around irises which other primates don’t have. Was this to improve visual communication with each other as well as dogs, who focus more on our eyes and where we look than any other creature? Dogs are programmed to watch us watch things like the mammoths we are hunting.

I am sure I am missing other points from her argument. But these are the ones I remember best.

Yes, her arguments become speculative at the end; however, her impeccable research and lucid prose, makes her hypothesis quite convincing.

I highly recommend this book.