220. The Dog
The first animal was also domesticated about the beginning of the Neolithic. Dog remains have been found in two very late post-Magdalenian Palæolithic sites, one in Scotland, the other in Denmark, both apparently Azilian in age. Then, the Danish kitchenmiddens, which began in the first stage of the Early Neolithic, contain innumerable bones that have been gnawed by dogs. The animals may still have been half wild at this period, since their own skeletons are rare in the middens. Evidently the species was not yet firmly attached to man; its members went off to die in solitude. This is what has generally been predicated on hypothetical grounds of the history of dog and man. Contrary to most domesticated animals, the dog is thought not to have been captured and tamed outright, but to have attached himself to human beings as a parasitic hanger-on, a shy, tolerated, uncared-for scavenger, living in a stage of symbiotic relationship with our ancestors before his real domestication. This view the prehistoric evidence seems to confirm.