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Hunters Who Haul with Dogs: Man’s Best-Friend or Woman’s Little Helper?

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Abstract

The use of dogs in haulage at the end of the Pleistocene is viewed as a pivotal event that facilitated the spread of modern humans into new environments. Using historic records and comparative data from 56 ethnographic cases, this study examines how canid haulage influenced different dimensions of populations mobility. These data show that while hauling dogs did not increase travel speed, they did improve the transport capacity of human populations. Improvements in transport capacity from canids is associated with the use of larger territories and longer distances in annual residential moves but not frequency of movement. Reductions in the energetic costs of transport for long residential and logistical moves benefited human populations, especially women, who are often tasked with carrying household burdens, more than men. The importance of hauling dogs in daily household activities likely had profound evolutionary impacts on prehistoric human-canid interactions.

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Data Availability

All of the data used in these analyses are available in the published literature. Interested readers are referred to the sources cited in this paper.

Notes

  1. Effective temperature or ET is found by the following formula: ET = 18 W-10C/(W–C) + 8, where W is the mean temperature in the warmest and C in the coldest months (after Kelly 2007: 66).

  2. Some of these groups also used dogs to haul people on skis and in boats.

  3. Binford’s (2001) data on total area utilized by different populations does not always match the values reported by other scholars (see Kelly 2007). Furthermore, some of the values reported seem extraordinarily large relative to the known ethnographic record. While area here is used as a ratio measure, should be viewed as an ordinal variable.

  4. Mason (1896:566) cites an anecdotal report of one man who claimed to haul a 34 kg load on a sled approximately 1609 km traveling about 3.8 km per hour.

  5. Mason (1896) reported that the use of sleds (pulled by humans or dogs) could generally increase transport capacity by three times the weight that could be carried by a single person or dog with a pack.

  6. Hearne (2007:213–214) reports: “These dogs are willing to haul a sledge, but as few men will be at the trouble of making sledges for them, the poor women are obliged to content themselves with lessening the bulk of their load, more than the weight, by making the dogs carry these articles only, which are always lashed on their backs….”.

  7. Heizer 1963: 190 describes how Steffanson observed Eskimos who had to transport driftwood 10–12 km inland because there were no local fuel sources.

  8. Wissler 1914: 3 citing La Verendrye’s journal while traveling with the Assiniboine in 1738–1739: “the women and dogs all carry baggage, the men are only burdened with their arms; they make the dogs even carry wood to make the fires, being often obliged to encamp on the open prairie, from which clumps of wood may be at a great distance.”.

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Acknowledgements

Some of the ideas expressed here are the result of extended e-mail correspondences with John Speth over the last few years. He rightly pointed out the value that hauling canids would have for women. I thank Dave Schmitt, who patiently edited several versions of this paper and provided many valuable suggestions. Two anonymous reviewers helped me reorganized the cluttered nature of the original draft. I especially thank Luis Pacheco-Cabos for inviting me to contribute to this special volume on dogs.

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    Karen D. Lupo

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Lupo, K.D. Hunters Who Haul with Dogs: Man’s Best-Friend or Woman’s Little Helper?. Hum Ecol 49, 707–719 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10745-021-00260-x

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