This conversation originally aired on In the Moment on March 12, 2020. You may listen to it in its entirety here:
Lori Walsh: Welcome back to In The Moment. I'm Lori Walsh. Dogs have been our companions for thousands of years. The Augustana University Archeology Lecture Series highlights the nature of the changing dog-human relationship. Joining us now for a preview, Matt Hill. He's associate professor of Anthropology at the University of Iowa. Matt Hill, welcome. Thanks for being here.
Matt Hill: Thank you for having me.
Lori Walsh: Also with us, Adrien Hannus, professor of Anthropology and director of the Augustana Archeology Lab. Adrien, welcome back.
Adrien Hannus: Yeah, thank you very much.
Lori Walsh: Adrien, I want to start with you. And for folks who participate with this ongoing learning lecture series, tell us a little bit about Matt Hill and why dogs' and human relationship is such a compelling topic.
Adrien Hannus: Well, of course, the research has been going on for some years trying to determine exactly even whether the evolutionary pathway of dogs in the New World would have been the same as in the Old World. And there's been a lot of really an acceleration, both in interest and I think in data, that it's been evolving here in just the last few years. So I think that the scenario that Matt has been interested in and sounded to me like something that might be one of the favorite topics of this year's discussions since our furry friends are getting more popular all the time.
Lori Walsh: Have people been overlooking this area of research and the interest is helping to drive the research? Or are there new discoveries that are sparking the interest?
Matt Hill: Well, there's a combination of things. There's always been an interest in dogs in general, but it was only within the last maybe 20, 30 years that actually scientists even thought it was a reasonable topic to study. They were thought to be pets. They were thought to be kind of a human product. They're an incredibly interesting evolutionary study, to study the biology of this. More importantly, I think of dogs as an insight into us, our ideas, our beliefs, our behaviors. Our mental state is tied to dogs. In the last decade or two, research has just exploded all over many, many different fields.
Lori Walsh: What are some of the things that we're starting to understand that we didn't understand before? Let's just pick an area and dive in.
Matt Hill: The evolution of dogs as they come out of wolves has been pretty clear for quite a while. What is interesting and, I think, new is that this connection to people, our ability as a species to move around the world, dogs were literally by our side, and that you can track the movements of peoples in the past and the present by looking at their dogs. You can think about how they are changing our emotional and psychological states. That's really where a lot of the new work is going into, is this connection, mental, personal, intellectual connection we're having with our dogs. That's really the new exciting areas.
Lori Walsh: And are we finding things in archeological digs or places where we can see evidence of how ... I'm trying to figure out what some of that research even looks like that might make us ask more deep questions.
Matt Hill: Well, one of the things that we're seeing is dog remains are appearing across the world associated with ancient humans and modern human, but they're also seeing that today we think of dogs as a pet, as a companion, family member, but they were tools. They helped us hunt or move equipment. We've used their fur to make clothing and fabrics. We see them as they are buried. One of the most ancient ways we've interacted with dogs was to bury them. So they have been part of our spiritual and religious practices and they have been food for us. And archeology has starting to show us all these different ways we've been using dogs and interacting with dogs.
Lori Walsh: Oh, I want to know more about this notion of food. Has that changed throughout time? Does that change throughout cultures? Can you tell, I guess because the distinguishing between a livestock and a pet or a hunting companion, how do we see that change?
Matt Hill: Well, this is the tricky thing. I think today in the US and much of the Western world, we think of dogs as pets, not livestock. Even I would say 100, 150 years ago in the US that divide was not as clear. And if you look across the world, what makes a dog or an individual dog a pet can be different than what makes it a food source. And this is across cultures. It's one of the things I do want to talk about, is that we've been consuming dog flesh for a long time even here. And it's not just certain cultures. It is a thing that we've been doing for a very long time and across boundaries of all sorts.
Lori Walsh: Adrien Hannus, tell me a little bit about how the human relationship with dogs has shown up in some of your work in the past.
Adrien Hannus: Well, we certainly have a great deal of evidence over at the Mitchell Prehistoric Indian Village, for instance, for dogs. And we've been conducting a ongoing research project in conjunction both with some people in England and also with some people at the Max Planck Institute in Germany with our specimens, because in part it was to determine even are we looking at, for sure, dogs? Or are we looking at coyotes, or ... And we do have direct evidence at Mitchell for their being utilized not ... We can't prove the traction or the hunting, kind of, but we can directly prove that they were at some times being used as a food source because we've found evidence of them in some of the roasting pits and so on.
And I know that what Matt is saying about, for instance, when I was in Vietnam right before the Tet Offensive occurred in 1968, we had been invited by one of the medical teams from the Philippines over to their camp because they were preparing dog as a delicacy for the Lunar New Year celebration. So it is a very definitely ... When we look at it across cultures, we have compartmentalized them, I think as Matt is saying, to the greatest degree as pets. And then people, even over at Mitchell whenever I'm giving tours, I am saying, "Well, they were probably animals of traction. They were beasts of burden. They may have been seen to some degree as pets, but also they were utilized as food," and some people are quite revulsed by that. But this isn't saying something that is supposed to be an upheaving thing. It's just a fact.
Lori Walsh: Right, and all part of how we change and evolve and think about things in new ways. Adrien Hannus, Matt Hill, thank you so much for your time. We appreciate it.
Matt Hill: Thank you very much.
Adrien Hannus: Thank you.