11,500-Year-Old Animal Bones in Jordan Suggest Early Dogs Helped Humans Hunt

Can new hunting techniques account for the increase in small prey?

One of the excavated structures at Shubayqa. 

 Credit: University of Copenhagen

When Yeomans and her co-authors sifted through the analysed data, they also noted a curious increase in the number of hares at the time that dogs appeared at Shubayqa 6. Hares were hunted for their meat, but Shubayqa 6’s inhabitants also used the hare bones to make beads. The team think that it is likely that the appearance of dogs and the increase in hares are related.

“The use of dogs for hunting smaller, fast prey such as hares and foxes, perhaps driving them into enclosures, could provide an explanation that is in line with the evidence we have gathered. The long history of dog use, to hunt both small as well as larger prey, in the region is well known, and it would be strange not to consider hunting aided by dogs as a likely explanation for the sudden abundance of smaller prey in the archaeological record,” said Lisa Yeomans.

“The shift may also be associated with a change in hunting technique from a method, such as netting, that saw an unselective portion of the hare population captured, to a selective method of hunting in which individual animals were targeted. This could have been achieved by dogs.”

Shubayqa 6 is situated on the northern edge of the Qa’ Shubayqa, around 130 km northeast of the Jordanian capital, Amman. It is the first substantial early Neolithic settlement identified in the Black Desert and has been under investigation since 2012; this and previous studies demonstrate that settlement in this semi-arid to arid zone was more intensive than previously thought and that the area could sustain large populations of animals and humans.

The excavations were carried out in collaboration with the Department of Antiquities of Jordan as part of a project funded by the Danish Council for Independent Research, Danish Institute in Damascus and H.P. Hjerl Mindefondet for Dansk Palæstinaforsking.

Contacts and sources:
Carsten Hansen / Zooarchaeologist Lisa Yeomans
University of Copenhagen Citation:  Close companions: Early evidence for dogs in northeast Jordan and the potential impact of new hunting methods published in Journal of Anthropological Archaeology.