Rensselaer Republican, Volume 17, Number 36, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 14 May 1885 — Prehistoric Dogs. [ARTICLE]

Prehistoric Dogs.

In the Danish “kitchen-middens,” or heaps of household refuse, piled up by the men of the newer stone period—a time when our Scandinavian forefathers used chipped or polished flints instead of metals for their weapons—are found bone-cuttings belonging to some species of the genus canis. Along with these remains are some of the long bones of birds, all the other bones of the said birds being absent. Now it is known that the bird bones here found are the very ones which dogs can not devour, while the absent ones are such as they can bolt with ease, and it has been ingeniously argued from this that the remains in question did really belong to a domestic dog, and if the animals to which they appertained had been wolves, they would have made short work of the long bones as well as of the others. Other dog bones are found in Denmark m later periods. At the time when the flint-knives were succeeded by bronze, a large dog existed, and at the time when iron was used, one larger still. In Switzerland, during the newer stone period, a dog existed, which is probably the oldest of which we have any record. It “partook of the character of our hounds and setters or spaniels,” and, in the matter of its skull, “was about equally remote from the wolf and jackal.” This dog, too, like its Danish contemporary, was succeeded in the bronze period by a larger variety. Thus we see that at a time when our ancestors were living “in dens and caves of the earth” in a state of civilization about equal to that of the African or Australian aborigines of the present day, the dog, was already systematically kept and “selected, ” that is, any good varieties which appeared were taken note of and kept up.— National History.