The canine connection: dogs and people in southern African hunter-gatherer societies

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AbstrAct. Southern African hunter-gatherers were among the last in the world to make the acquaintance of the domestic dog, most likely around 2000 years ago. This paper begins by surveying the evidence for the presence of dogs in hunter-gatherer contexts in southern Africa. It then takes advantage of the region’s rich ethnographic and historical sources to consider what the consequences of this acquaintance may have been. The ways in which southern African hunter-gatherers used the dog in their subsistence strategies, the social role of the animal and the symbolic importance accorded it are placed within a broader com-parative context that draws on examples from elsewhere in the world.

Introduction

Dogs may be man’s (and woman’s) best friend, but south-ern Africa was one of the very last places on Earth that they reached (Figure 1). Generally thought to have been introduced as part of an ‘Iron Age’ agropastoralist package in the first millennium AD, they were taken up by the re-gion’s hunter-gatherers, but surprisingly little archaeologi-cal attention has been given to exploring the reasons for, or consequences of, their take-up by the region’s hunter-gatherers (but see Vinnicombe 1976; Woodhouse 1990; Clutton-Brock 1994/95; Hall 2002). Correspondingly little effort has been put into comparing the use of dogs by south-ern African hunter-gatherers with their significance for forager peoples elsewhere in the world, such as Australia or the Americas. Without pretending to be comprehensive, this paper seeks to triangulate between archaeological, an-thropological and historical sources of evidence to address these omissions. After summarising what is known of the antiquity and distribution of the dog south of the Zambezi, I examine the role of Canis familiaris in Bushman subsis-tence strategies, social relations and beliefs. I then try to identify some of the factors that may have promoted the adoption or neglect of this new resource.

Dogs in southern Africa: Antiquity and Associations

Wild canids are a well-established part of southern Africa’s indigenous fauna. Still common are the largely insectivo-

rous bat-eared fox (Otocyon megalotis) and the Cape fox (Vulpes chama), a predator of insects and mice. Even more ubiquitous is the black-backed jackal (Canis mesomelas), which is found virtually throughout the region. Related, but much less studied, is the side-striped jackal (C. adustus), which replaces it in northernmost Botswana, Zimbabwe and Mozambique, and co-occurs with it in northeastern Namib-ia, southern Mozambique and the lowveld of Mpumalanga, Limpopo Province, Swaziland and the Matupaland area of KwaZulu-Natal. The most dog-like, and carnivorous, of all the region’s canids, is the wild dog (Lycaon pictus), now severely endangered and greatly reduced in extent, but with strongholds in northern Botswana, Zimbabwe’s Hwange National Park and the Mpumalanga lowveld (Mills and Hes 1997). Save for the bat-eared fox, all these taxa may be sufficiently closely related to warrant classification within the same sub-family, the Caninae (Kleiman 1967), the ear-liest African ancestors of which appeared in the Miocene (Cooke 1968). Fossil and genetic evidence suggest that wild dogs then diverged from the genus Canis two to three million years ago (McNutt and Boggs 1996:5).

When, then, did dogs first arrive in southern Africa? An-swering this question is not straightforward for several reasons, one of them the rarity of dog remains in situations where dogs were neither eaten nor ritually buried, another the likelihood that many animals may have died off-site while hunting (Plug 1996:518). There is also the possibil-ity of confusing dog remains with those of jackals, though this should not be over-estimated since while postcranial remains are indeed difficult (though not impossible) to differentiate, teeth and jaws are much more readily iden-tifiable to species level (Klein & Cruz-Uribe 1989)1. With these caveats in place, the oldest evidence for the dog in the region comes from Ina Plug’s own research at two early agropastoralist sites: Diamant (Limpopo Province, South Africa) around AD 570 and Bosutswe (Botswana) around AD 700 (Plug 1996). Both finds predate the ap-pearance of dogs in late first millennium agropastoralist

the canine connection: Dogs and southern African Hunter-gatherers

Peter Mitchell†

† School of Archaeology, University of Oxford Address for correspondence: St Hugh’s College, Oxford, OX2 6LE, United Kingdom [[email protected]]

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The Canine Connection: Dogs and Southern African Hunter-gatherers • Mitchell

contexts in the Shashe-Limpopo Basin (Voigt 1983) and KwaZulu-Natal (Maggs and Michael 1976; Voigt and von den Driesch 1984). Together, these associations suggest, but do not prove, that dogs were first introduced by the Iron Age farmers who began settling in southern Africa early in the first millennium AD (Mitchell 2002). What, however, of dogs in Later Stone Age (herder and hunter-gatherer) contexts?

For a long time, the oldest firm evidence of this was the juvenile dog skeleton found with a nearly complete human burial in a shell midden at Cape St Francis on South Afri-ca’s Indian Ocean coast. The grave is dated to 1150 ± 40 BP (Pta-2553), which calibrates to the late first millennium AD (Chappel 1968/69; Voigt 1983:70–71). Klein and Cruz-Uribe (1989; Cruz-Uribe and Klein 1994) later identified dogs in the initial occupation of Kasteelberg B, near South Africa’s Atlantic coast, pushing their presence back to around 1300 radiocarbon years ago. The same site yielded indirect evidence for their presence in the form of chewed seal bones that, for taphonomic reasons, are unlikely to have been modified by jackals, the only other possible canid. Marean (1985) noted similar damage from roughly

the same period (1400–1100 BP) at Smitswinkelbaai Cave on the Cape Peninsula and it is also evident on seal bones from the rather later Dunefield Midden site (Cruz-Uribe and Klein 1994). All these finds come from contexts that were probably (Kasteelberg B, Smitswinkelbaai) or pos-sibly (Cape St Francis, Dunefield Midden) associated with herders. The same association holds for the two dogs buried beneath a stone cairn at Zerrissene Mountain, Namibia, c. 260 ± 30 BP (Pta-1610) (Carr et al. 1976, 1978; Voigt 1983:69). The only archaeozoological evidence of which I am aware for dogs in a hunter-gatherer context comes from Pitsaneng, Lesotho, where the association is second millennium AD in age (Hobart 2003; Plug 2003). Whether dog remains from Rooikrans in the eastern Free State result from hunter-gatherer activity is more debatable as the rel-evant levels date to the late nineteenth/twentieth centuries AD (Plug 2000; Thorp 2000).

While there is thus remarkably little archaeozoological evidence for southern African hunter-gatherers owning them, the general pattern of dates is consistent with dogs having been introduced to the region by either Iron Age agropastoralists alone, or by both them and Stone Age herd-

Figure 1. Map of southern Africa showing locations of ethnographic groups and archaeological sites mentioned in the text. Ethnographic groups appear in bold italics, modern place names in normal font. Archaeological sites are abbreviated thus: BOS Bosutswe; CSF Cape St Francis; DIA Diamant; DFM Dunefield Midden; KBB Kasteelberg B; NDW Ndondonwane; PIT Pitsaneng; RK Rooikrans; SMT Smitswinkelbaai Cave; ZM Zerrissene Mountain.

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Animals and People: Archaeozoological Papers in Honour of Ina Plug

ers. The seventeenth century Cape Khoekhoen valued dogs for controlling and protecting their sheep flocks (Deacon 1984:282), and there is no reason why this relationship could not date back to the arrival of sheep in southernmost Africa some 2000 years ago (Mitchell 2002). As attention continues to focus on the antiquity and significance of sheep-keeping in Later Stone Age contexts (Sadr 2000), the possibility that dogs and sheep spread together should be kept in mind.

Rock art, which I discuss below, and the historical and ethnographic literatures help extend the distribution of dogs in hunter-gatherer contexts. Particularly informative are references to dogs being kept by the mid-seventeenth century Sonqua of the Western Cape (Schapera and Farrington 1933:33), nineteenth century Bushmen in the Karoo (Hewitt 1986; Hollmann 2004) and Maloti-Drakensberg regions (Vinnicombe 1976:57, 89) and the //Xegwi of Mpumalanga (Potgieter 1955). In the Kalahari the list includes the Dobe Ju/’hoansi (Lee 1979), the G/wi and G//ana (Ikeya 1994; Kent 1996), the Nharo (Pas-sarge 1907:81; Bleek 1928:16; Guenther 1986) and the /’Auni-≠Khomani (Steyn 1984). Even so, the possession of dogs was not universal. Silberbauer (1981), for instance, makes no reference to them among the G/wi of the 1960s (though they were used there to hunt foxes and jackals in the 1930s and 1940s; Ikeya 2005:35), and they were not kept by the Gautscha Ju/’hoansi of Namibia in the 1950s (Marshall 1999:101).

Dogs and Hunter-gatherers: Subsistence

Why did southern African hunter-gatherers choose to keep dogs? What part, if any, did they play in people’s subsis-tence strategies, social relations and systems of belief? I ad-dress this question in two parts, focusing first on the use of dogs in hunting, for which considerable evidence exists.

Recent anthropological fieldwork in the Kalahari has yielded several accounts of hunting with dogs and the circumstances in which this takes place (Figure 2). Ikeya (1994) provides the most detailed study, discussing how the G/wi and G//ana hunted with dogs in the late 1980s on foot and from horseback, with spears their most common weapon. Gemsbok was the most frequently tackled big game species, but immature hartebeest, springbok, steen-bok and duiker were also hunted, along with genets, foxes and jackals. Dogs were used throughout the period ob-served (August 1987 to January 1988), but most commonly in December when several antelope species give birth, making their young especially vulnerable. For gemsbok, the technique used was to chase, intimidate and pin down the prey, while for the other taxa the dogs killed the quarry directly. Dogs were individually owned and named and could be exchanged between hunters. They also frequently fell victim to predators, prey or other causes.

Painting a broadly similar picture, Lee (1979) records that hunting dogs were widely used by the Dobe Ju/’hoansi in

Figure 2. A Kalahari Bushman from ≠Kade, Botswana, with his dogs (courtesy and copyright Dr Kazunobu Ikeya).

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the 1960s and that in 1964 about one-third of all the meat obtained was killed with their aid, a figure that rose to 75% during one particular period of observation. On the other hand, in 1967–69 dogs were much less important. Without explaining why this was so, he concludes that their contri-bution was clearly quite variable, making them an optional adjunct rather than “an integral part of the !Kung hunting complex” (Lee 1979:143)2. Nonetheless, 79% of the adult men sampled (N = 151) had owned or hunted with dogs, and of these roughly the same proportion had done so success-fully (77%, N = 119). Interestingly, success rates correlated with age, reaching 73% for men over 60 compared to only 57% for those under 50.

Dogs were used in several ways when hunting: as an aid in tracking (their power of scent combining effectively with Ju/’hoan skills in reading visual sign), to help follow wounded prey, as a way of killing small game (duiker, hare, steenbok) and as a means of keeping larger game (gemsbok, warthog) at bay while hunters used their spears to dispatch it. Most hunters kept one or two dogs, but for hunting gemsbok at least five were needed. Attacking this animal with its sharp horns, or warthogs with their equally sharp tusks, was dangerous work, and dogs were frequently gored, sometimes killed, as a result. All told, hunting with dogs was the second most common means by which Dobe Ju/’hoan hunters obtained meat, with up to three warthogs being taken per month in some instances. Indeed, ≠Toma, an unusually successful hunter-with-dogs commented, “If you don’t have dogs, you don’t even bother to hunt wart-hogs” (Lee 1979:144).

Reports from other parts of the Kalahari agree that dogs were principally used to hunt small mammals and gems-bok. Thus, Kent (1993) describes how Bushmen living at Kutse hunted hares, ground squirrels and a range of fur-bearing carnivores (mongoose, wild cats, jackals and foxes) with their dogs. The Nharo also employed dogs in this way, as well as to catch small antelope, though never big game (Bleek 1928). Farther south, gemsbok were again the principal target of dog-using /’Auni-≠Khomani hunters (Steyn 1984:121), while among the !Xõ of west-central Botswana hunting with dogs had superseded the use of the bow-and-arrow by the 1980s (Liebenberg 1990:65). South of the Limpopo, Potgieter (1955) merely notes that the //Xegwi used dogs to chase game, but much more specific information is available for the nineteenth century /Xam of the Karoo, who used them to chase and kill hares, wild cats, baboons, jackals, aardwolves and hyenas (Bleek and Lloyd 1911:59, 373; Lewis-Williams 2000:85, 248; Hol-lmann 2004:18–19, 60). More unusual is a report of Bush-men in the Lesotho Highlands hunting eland with dogs in 1869 (Vinnicombe 1976:89). Note too that according to

the seventeenth century Dutch writer Olfert Dapper, who probably drew on an eye-witness account, the Sonquas [i.e. the indigenous forager population; Parkington (1984)] of the mountains north and inland of Cape Town kept “many hunting dogs, trained to hunt the rock-rabbits [rock hy-raxes; Procavia capensis] which are their principal food, and knowing how to drag these animals out of their holes” (Schapera and Farrington 1933:33).

Southern African hunter-gatherers thus had three major tar-gets when hunting with dogs: small game of steenbok size or less; small fur-bearing mammals; and gemsbok, eland and warthog. Why should there be this degree of specialisa-tion and so little use made of dogs when hunting medium- or large-sized antelope? Yellen and Lee (1976:39) note that duiker, steenbok, warthogs (and, we may add, hyraxes) all have quite limited ranges and are thus relatively predictable resources, but by itself this seems insufficient. Instead, the key issue would seem to be prey size since dogs can run down and directly kill small mammals (those weighing ≤20 kg; Liebenberg 1990:65). With larger game, both the size and behaviour of the prey become relevant. A major reason for emphasising gemsbok when hunting with dogs is that when attacked they often, though not always, search out cover into which they can back to protect their rear while using their horns to ward off predators (Blurton-Jones and Konner 1976:342). This allows the dogs to hold the ante-lope at bay until the hunters can get to within 10 m or so and use their spears to kill it. Liebenberg (1990:65–66) also points out that !Xõ dogs, like their Ju/’hoan counterparts, are encouraged to follow the animal’s scent and thus help track it through the bush. Even so, they must be taught to hunt, something achieved by boiling a gemsbok’s feet in water that is then given to the dog so that it starts to asso-ciate the scent with food. Younger dogs, accompanying a hunt, also learn from older, more experienced ones (Lieben-berg 1990:65), and the dogs’ movements can be controlled using whistled commands (Lee 1979:143). Warthogs, it should be noted, are susceptible to hunting with dogs for much the same reason as gemsbok since a common reaction to attack is to flee to their burrow and defend themselves from within it (Estes 1991:221).

Gemsbok are not alone in backing into cover and turn-ing to face dogs, but with other antelope this behaviour is typical only of mothers with young calves. Thus, the Ju/’hoan woman Nisa recounted how dogs helped kill a mother wildebeest and her calf (Shostak 1990:89). Gener-ally, however, although they may chase other animals, such as springbok, when out in the bush, dogs cannot possibly catch them, and springbok, wildebeest, hartebeest, eland and other game usually flee at their approach (Liebenberg 1990:65). Indeed, after having used his dog to kill some

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hyena cubs, the /Xam Bushman ≠Kasin left it tied to a bush when he went to hunt springbok, presumably because he felt that in this new situation it would be of no use; //Kabbo’s account of hunting with dogs makes exactly the same point (Lewis-Williams 2000:85; 248). Looking at how other ungulates respond to predators (Estes 1991), the hunting tactics of wild dogs (McNutt and Boggs 1996) and known Bushman hunting practices (e.g., Liebenberg 1990) does, however, suggest that Kalahari and /Xam eth-nographies paint too limited a picture of the possibilities of hunting with dogs. Wild dogs, for example, are specia-lised predators of medium-sized antelope, a category that includes not only springbok, but also species like impala and reedbuck. The latter lack endurance (Estes 1991:98) and are relatively easy prey for wild dogs in the dry season when cover is scarce. Grey rhebuck, on the other hand, though fleeing from wild dogs at distances of 150–200 m, are reluctant to leave their home territory, preferring to use hilly terrain to get out of sight. Eland, while easy to spook, depend more on size and co-operative maternal defence than flight when confronted by predators, even lions. Moreover, they are relatively easy to wind and can be run down, a technique employed by several Bushman groups against large antelope (e.g., Silberbauer 1981:215). Using dogs would presumably have made this strategy even more effective.

These observations suggest that southern African hunters might find dogs helpful when targeting a wider range of game, especially where the latter’s movements are hindered by difficult terrain (for example, in mountainous or deeply dissected landscapes) or their own bulk. Although only one direct observation survives of Bushmen hunting eland with dogs, paintings in the Maloti-Drakensberg area suggest that this may not have been uncommon. Moreover, the etho-logical data just reviewed indicate that it could have been extended to some of the other antelope found there. The same paintings, it may be noted, match Kalahari practice in showing hunters armed with spears, not bows and arrows; as with gemsbok, the function of the dogs was presumably to tire out and pin down the prey until the hunters could approach and dispatch it (Lewis-Williams 1981:90; Wood-house 1990:119)3.

Dogs and Hunter-gatherers: Social Relations and Beliefs

Animals have a central role in Bushman belief (Vinnicombe 1976; Lewis-Williams 1981; Biesele 1993; Guenther 1994; Hollman 2004), while worldwide dogs have had a wealth of social, symbolic and ritual associations (Thurston 1996; Snyder and Moore 2006). Surprisingly, however, other than in rock art there has been little focus on this aspect of southern African hunter-gatherers’ association with dogs.

Here I address how dogs have featured in hunter-gatherer exchange systems, mythology and diet, as well as consider-ing the circumstances leading to their selective incorpora-tion into the rock art corpus.

An informative passage in the archive obtained by Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd from their nineteenth century /Xam teachers reveals how and why dogs were sought through exchange. /Han≠kass’o, who recounted the story, recalled that his grandfather had bought dogs from a man called /Gappem-ttu, and used them to kill jackals, the skins of which were made into karosses. These karosses were then given to /Gappem-ttu as an “equivalent (?) for the dog”, /Gappem-ttu reciprocating with the gift of a pot (Bleek and Lloyd 1911:372–375. Here, quite concisely, we have an example of the reciprocal gift-exchange that has entered the archaeological literature under the Ju/’hoan name hxaro, as well as confirmation that dogs, like other possessions except food, were considered appropriate items in such exchanges. Barnard’s (1992:141) reference to the Nharo exchanging dogs within their own //ai gift-exchange net-works extends the practice into the Kalahari, while dogs could also be obtained through trade with non-Bushman groups; Vinnicombe (1976:57) notes an occasion in the southern Drakensberg in 1849 when Bushmen acquired them from neighbouring agropastoralists in exchange for stolen cattle. More recently, Central Kalahari Bushmen obtained dogs through trading antelope skins and carnivore pelts with their Tswana neighbours in the 1920s and 1930s (Ikeya 2005:36).

That dogs could be acquired through hxaro-type relations fits perfectly with the absence of ethnographic or ethnohis-toric references to their consumption as food, although cut marks on bones from Ndondonwane suggests that practice among first millennium AD farming communities was sometimes different (Voigt and von den Driesch 1984:98). Indeed, for at least some Bushman groups dogs are not merely not eaten, they are rejected even from consideration as food. Thus, Marshall (1999:101) reports that the Nyae-Nyae Ju/’hoansi categorise dogs as tshi dole (‘harmful/worthless things’), i.e., animals the consumption of which is unthinkable, even though no specific ill-effects are ex-pected to follow their being eaten. Interestingly, wild dogs were also tshi dole, along with hyenas and lions, but jack-als, which can be eaten by old women, are not (Marshall 1999:103). Lee (1979:272) confirms these food preferences from his own research among the Dobe Ju/’hoansi, while Tanaka (1980:68) records that although some elderly G/wi and G//ana might eat lion, and even hyena, and no prohi-bitions applied to eating jackals or other carnivores, wild dogs are completely excluded from the category of food because of the belief that they eat human corpses, a surpris-

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ing conviction given that this species consumes virtually nothing but freshly killed meat (Estes 1991:411).

At least for some Bushmen, then, dogs are identified more with wild dogs than their genetically closer jackal cousins. This association makes sense when we consider the behav-iour of the three species. Jackals are very much omnivores, at best able to kill animals the size of a springbok, but more generally restricted to animals no larger than a hare. Moreover, except where adult offspring continue to live with their parents and help raise the next year’s young, they normally live in pairs with attendant pups. In both prey size and group size they thus differ radically from wild dogs, which are exclusively carnivores, specialising in medium-sized antelope that they hunt co-operatively in packs of ten to as many as 60 animals (Estes 1991). Do-mesticated dogs do not, on their own, hunt animals as large as impala, springbok or reedbuck, but they are successfully used by people to tackle animals much larger than a hare: gemsbok, warthog and even eland. Socially too, they live in much larger groups (of dogs and of people-with-dogs) than jackals. On both counts, it is wild dogs that they most closely resemble, a resemblance that extends to size, colour and overall body shape. I suggest that once dogs were in-troduced to southern Africa these behavioural and physical parallels encouraged at least some Bushmen to associate them symbolically with wild dogs, rather than with other indigenous carnivores.

This possibility gains interest if we consider how dogs feature in Bushman mythology, ritual and rock art. Jackals have generally positive connotations, being, for example, animals into which /Xam shamans could transform them-selves to accompany people and look after them (Hollmann 2004:225–226). Wild dogs, on the other hand, feature only rarely (and negatively) in the Bleek/Lloyd archive. In one instance they are condemned for their niggardly behaviour, a serious fault in a society that prized the sharing of food (BC151_A2_1_100.8216–8231). On another occasion, the wild dog marries a quagga, a disastrous decision as his rela-tives then make him kill his bride so that all can eat her. The inappropriateness of marriage between carnivores and graz-ers is reinforced at the tale’s end when the wild dog is himself killed by the quagga’s children (Hollmann 2004:359–365). With wild dogs at least partly associated with the domestic species, it is thus of interest to read the Ju/’hoansi reaction to the possibility of incest with parents, siblings or children, a denunciation pithily recorded in the words “Only dogs do that—not men” (Marshall 1976:254).

Turning south to the /Xam, dogs appear as keywords in just 17 stories in the Bleek/Lloyd archive (Lloyd Bleek Project 2007). Some of these references are, as already

noted, straightforward accounts of the use of dogs in hunt-ing4. This seems so even where the events take place in the mythological realm, as when dogs chase and kill hares in the story of the Hare and the Moon (Bleek and Lloyd 1911:59). Another account describes how dogs featured in girls’ puberty rituals. As part of these, the girl had to chew a piece of meat from an animal that her father’s dogs had killed. She then took dirt from her knee, mixed it with the meat and spat the mixture into the mouth of the dog. This ‘curious /Xam ritual’ (Lewis-Williams 1981:51) becomes explicable when we recognise that the girl’s liminal status made her a source of supernatural potency with possibly adverse effects on men’s hunting success, including their bows, arrows and dogs (Hewitt 1986:282–283). Dogs were also believed to be able to affect a hunter’s success more directly, since on occasion springbok shoulder blades were deliberately placed out of their reach as part of the /nanna-sse observances that ensured respect for the dead animal. Were dogs to have had access to the bones then a hunter might have been wounded when next shooting arrows (Bleek and Lloyd 1911:279–283)5.

Other references to dogs attest to their ability to detect the presence of evil shamans who shot arrows of sick-ness into people; the dogs barked at their approach (Hol-lmann 2004:211). The ability of dogs to protect sleeping people from marauding lions, something emphasised by the /Xam shaman //Kabbo, as well as more recently in a Ju/’hoan context by Thomas (2003), should perhaps also be viewed in this light, rather than as just a ‘real world’ reason to value dogs: lions were (and still are) a favourite animal into which shamans could transform themselves (BC151_A2_1_022-024.1548–1562; Lewis-Williams and Pearce 2004:119). The role of dogs in detecting malevo-lent “sorcerors” is reinforced by one further comment, this time from Diä!kwain, who said that “a sorceror smells like a dog, smells from afar off, he smells what has been happening here, while he is sleeping there” while on out-of-body travel in trance (Hollmann 2004:248). Attributing to dogs the power to scent out shamans or spirits is, of course, an obvious extension of one of their prime quali-ties, their good noses. Only once is there a hint of dogs taking a more central role within /Xam myth or ritual, when Diä!kwain, describing the dance represented in a painting recorded by George Stow as a “dance danced by sorcerors” that was concerned with //ken (supernatural po-tency), noted that in it girls and young men imitated dogs, older women gemsbok (BC151–A2_1_059.4744–4750, 4755–4757). Regrettably, he did not amplify this com-ment, but the dog/gemsbok association suggests that the dance may have taken place after a successful hunt or that it alluded to participants hunting gemsbok power in the spirit world.

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On the whole, then, the /Xam seem to have valued dogs primarily as hunting aids, incorporating them into their belief systems as little more than living extensions of the hunter and his toolkit. Thus, dogs could protect camps from both real and supernatural predators and shamans were also likened to dogs (in having a heightened sense of smell), though without transforming themselves into them. The un-importance of dogs in /Xam mythology is paralleled among other Bushman groups (e.g., Deacon 1994:241; Guenther 1994:271). The Nharo, for example, exclude dogs from the dangerous category of n/ie /wa (‘clawed children’ or predators) but still consider them, like other domesticated species, to have been among the animals of the first cre-ation. However, like donkeys and goats (and unlike cattle) they feature there as second-class citizens, behaving just as they do today, i.e., unable to walk, talk or act like people. Significantly, too, dogs do not feature among the animals that give their names to Nharo medicine dances or medicine songs, those seen by trancing shamans, or those into which shamans can transform themselves (Guenther 1986:227).

Bushman rock art offers further insights into how southern African hunter-gatherers understood dogs (Figure 3). The first thing to note is that representations of dogs are rare. Deacon (1994), for example, could find no definite trace of dogs among the rock engravings that she examined in the /Xam homeland in South Africa’s Northern Cape Province, and they likewise go unmentioned in surveys of paintings in the southwestern Cape (Yates et al. 1994:34–35, 58). With very few exceptions, principally in Zimbabwe and the Eastern Cape Province, known images come from the Maloti-Drakensberg region of KwaZulu-Natal, Lesotho and the eastern Free State (Woodhouse 1990). These images take two principal forms. First, dogs are shown helping men armed with spears to hunt eland or baboon (Vinnicombe 1976:88–89, 225, 227, 253), or sometimes walking alongside men armed with bows and arrows who are not engaged in hunting (Vinnicombe 1976:56). Alter-natively, they are depicted accompanying women who carry sticks that in many cases are clearly recognisable as digging sticks, perhaps indicating that the dogs might help capture small mammals on plant-gathering expeditions (Vinnicombe 1976:280). In some cases dogs are shown on leashes (Woodhouse 1990), in others at home in Bushman camps (Vinnicombe 1976:70–71).

The temptation to read such scenes as straightforward narratives of how dogs were actually used should be re-sisted, or at least subjected to critical scrutiny, for it is an axiom of current research that narrowly empiricist views of Bushman rock art are flawed, theoretically deficient and unconvincing. Instead, we know that the vast bulk of the art is concerned with the acquisition and representation

of both the supernatural potency that shamans sought in altered states of consciousness and the contexts in which that power was tapped (Lewis-Williams and Loubser 1986; Lewis-Williams and Pearce 2004). Did dogs form part of this shamanistic universe? The overall rarity of dogs in the art and the apparent absence of therianthropic figures that combine dog and human attributes suggest that the answer to this question should be only to a limited degree. Such a conclusion chimes with the observations already made about the scarcity of dogs in Bushman myths (which also draw upon a shamanistic cosmology; Lewis-Williams 1998) and ritual, except as part of hunters’ toolkits. But this is not the whole story6. Pointing to this are scenes in which dogs help people to hunt baboons (e.g., Vinnicombe 1976:225, 227). Baboons, we know from the Bleek/Lloyd archive and the accounts given by the Maloti Bushman Qing to Orpen (1874), had once been people, but had been fixed as animals because of their antisocial behaviour. They nevertheless retained much supernatural potency, though this was generally employed in negative ways that could

Figure 3. Painting of a man and his dog, Thaba Tseka District, Lesotho.

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include destroying the food resources on which people depended for their survival (Hollmann 2004:7–28). Dogs, which at least for the /Xam could identify malevolent sha-mans, may thus have been an appropriate element in the supernatural armoury used to deal with the threats posed by baboons, not just a convenient weapon in the real world. As Hollmann (2004:18–19) comments, the fact that baboons were thought to be afraid of a hunter’s dog because it was “a girl’s dog” very likely refers to the efficacy of a newly pubescent maiden’s supernatural power in ensuring that her father’s dogs could hunt well, to the transfer, in other words, of that power into the dog itself.

A second indication that paintings of dogs deserve more than a simple glance is given by their presence at a site near Barkly East published by Lewis-Williams (1981:90). The scene (Figure 4) shows hunters attacking a herd of four eland and two rhebuck. Their attention focuses on one of the eland, which is being pursued at close quarters by two dogs and two men, both armed with spears. With one spear entering its back and another its rump, the eland is shown collapsing, the dogs harassing its hindquarters, belly and neck. Thus far, then, an apparently simple representation of the use of dogs to hunt eland, just as spear-equipped hunters use them to pin down gemsbok in the Kalahari. However,

two images indicate that more is at stake. First, the eland is shown with a red line, presumably of blood, issuing from its nose. While this may happen when an eland dies, at least from the effects of arrow poison, the depiction of nasal blood, and of the dying eland itself, is redolent with the supernatural potency that this animal possesses and with the behaviour of shamans who ‘die’ in trance to acquire eland power and use it inter alia to heal the sick (Lewis-Williams 1981). Moreover, immediately behind the eland’s right front leg squats a man pointing his bow-and-arrow directly at one of the hunters. So doing, he seems to protect the eland, (and thus its power), an association that again makes one wonder how far this is just an ‘ordinary’ eland hunt7. Are we seeing here a reference to combat between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ shamans, both of them seeking access to the potency of the eland, with dogs used to assist one of the parties to the fight?

A third and final pointer to the importance of dogs is given by Ouzman and Loubser (2000) when discussing what they term the ‘art of the apocalypse’, the last decades of rock art production in the area known historically as Nomansland, at the junction of the Eastern Cape Province, KwaZulu-Natal and Lesotho. A recurrent motif in this art is “a strange doglike creature,” typically painted chasing and attacking

Figure 4. Painting of dogs being used to hunt eland, Barkly East District, South Africa (courtesy and copyright Rock Art Research Institute, University of the Witwatersrand).

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grotesque human figures (Ouzman and Loubser 2000:42). Blundell (2004) terms such figures Eldritch Images and argues that they represent the spirits of the dead that bring sickness to the living. Given that some Bushman belief sys-tems conflate hostile individuals or groups in the real world with malevolent forces in the spirit world (Guenther 1986), there need be no contradiction between this interpretation and that of Ouzman and Loubser, who use Qing’s testimony to Orpen (1874) to suggest that the Eldritch Images are black and white settlers reworked into the giant cannibals that plagued people in mythical times. To help the hero Cogaz defeat and kill them /Kaggen, the creator, “cut up his kaross and sandals and turned them into dogs and wild dogs, and set them at the Qobé giants and destroyed them” (Orpen 1874:6). Though this part of Qing’s account does not refer to any paintings, the connection seems plausible, and suggests that dog, or dog-like, images in Bushman rock art deserve more thorough study.

Why Dogs?

Having discussed the ethnography, ethnohistory and archae-ology of dogs among southern African hunter-gatherers, I conclude by posing two questions: why did Bushmen adopt dogs in the first place? And how does the position of the dog in Bushman thought and practice compare with its role among hunter-gatherer societies elsewhere in the world?

Decisions to keep dogs will have been grounded in some estimation of the costs and benefits of so doing. The princi-pal cost must have been providing them with food, though Arbousset and Daumas (1968:252) recorded that some mid-nineteenth century hunter-gatherers moved around without dogs to avoid being detected by their enemies. For the Dobe Ju/’hoansi, Lee (1979) notes that dogs are well fed only when meat is plentiful and typically become thin and weak when this is not the case. Because they are given “what is left over when people have eaten their fill” (Lee 1979:272) their condition shows more seasonal variation than that of the Bushmen themselves. Tanaka (1980:50), too, records that dogs are normally only fed (on scraps of meat and internal organs) after successful hunts, otherwise being left to fend for themselves on insects and unspecified “small animals”. The deliberate provision of alternatives to meat in the form of “shelled nuts and other foods” seems to be only rarely practised as Lee (1979:144) notes it as a peculiarity of ≠Toma, a Ju/’hoan man especially skilled at hunting with dogs. Obviously, the Kalahari, from which these accounts derive, is a more extreme environment than many others inhabited by precolonial hunter-gatherers and in habitats with more reliable and productive resources the decision to keep dogs may have been an easier one. This does not mean, however, that it was a done deal, since we

must also think about whether the acquisition of dogs pro-vided benefits, and whether those benefits will have been universally applicable.

Dogs hold numerous attractions that include being eaten, carrying or pulling loads, helping in hunting by reducing search, pursuit and retrieval times, and warning people about the approach of predators or strangers (Kelly 1995:110; Fiedel 2005). In addition, of course, they may be valued for their company, or, as reported from some central Australian groups, for their role as blankets on cold desert nights (Meggitt 1965). For southern Africa, insufficient is known about most precolonial hunter-gatherer subsistence economies to predict the precise effects of dogs on diet breadth and content. However, the kinds of hunting prac-tices to which dogs are best suited offer some guidance, especially when informed by earlier debates on their role within Australian Aboriginal societies (Jones 1970; Ham-ilton 1972; Hayden 1975; Gould 1980).

As Hayden (1975:12) points out, “if one decides to hunt with a dog, the strategy adopted will be suited to hunt-ing with the dog”. In the Australian context this ruled out hunting from behind blinds or stalking game, emphasising instead the use of dogs against animals that could be suc-cessfully chased, particularly in the rainforests of Queen-sland and New Guinea where prey could be treed (Meggitt 1965). The historically well-documented adoption of dogs by Tasmanian Aborigines at the beginning of the nineteenth century confirms that dogs were used to follow scents, chase game, tire it and then pin it down until the hunters (equipped with spears) could arrive. The role of the dog, in other words, was probably to replace people in harrying prey, thereby reducing energy expenditure, releasing some men for other tasks, and facilitating the capture of larger game, especially kangaroos (Jones 1970). Conversely, dogs were only rarely used in more open habitats on the Austra-lian mainland where prey could readily escape before being trapped (Flannery 1994:276). The conclusion is the same as that developed earlier on when considering the situations in which Kalahari and other southern African hunter-gatherers use(d) dogs to hunt: prey size, behaviour and density all need considering, along with terrain.

Bearing these factors in mind, some of the situations in which southern African hunter-gatherers may have found dogs of greatest use probably included those where:

they sought to increase their access to small game, 1. such as hares or fur-bearing carnivores; larger prey could be pinned down or tired out, taking 2. advantage of species that retreat into bush (gemsbok) or burrows (warthogs), tire easily (eland), find running

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away difficult (smaller taxa like duiker and steenbok, immature wildebeest, springbok and hartebeest) or can have their movements manipulated in rugged ter-rain (grey rhebuck and eland?);dogs could outperform existing technologies, for 3. example in substituting for snares damaged by rain in the wet season when hunting duiker and steenbok (data tabulated by Ikeya (1994:122) lend support to this argument).

As an example of how such ideas might be developed, data from the Kalahari suggest that one context in which the first criterion applies is where hunter-gatherers develop trading or tributary relations with other communities. Thus, the early twentieth century Nharo hunted fur-bearing mammals with dogs so that they could trade the hides for tobacco, the dogs themselves coming from Tswana, Damara or Euro-pean neighbours (Bleek 1928). More recently, Ikeya (1994) identified the opportunities of turning jackal and wild cat hides into handicrafts and the sale of gemsbok biltong as prime motives for the increased use of hunting dogs among the ≠Kade Bushmen of Botswana. As hunter-gatherers in many parts of southern Africa developed increasingly close, and often eventually subordinate, relations with farmers over the past 2000 years, this is a situation that may have repeated itself again and again. Wadley’s (1996) argument that agropastoralist expansion frequently led to the economic and social ‘strangulation’ of forager groups and a need for them to exploit a wider range of (previously less favoured) foodstuffs is also relevant: if larger game became increasingly difficult to acquire because it was supplanted by livestock, hunted by farmers themselves or rendered inaccessible where forager movements were curtailed, then ground game will have risen in importance. Dogs, as we have seen, are ideal for taking hares, small, territorial antelope and even hyraxes, and could thus have been favoured as a means of obtaining both food for forag-ers and furs for farmers.

Dogs have been present in parts of southern Africa since at least the mid-first millennium AD (Plug 1996), so the possibility that they were only widely taken up by hunter-gatherers comparatively recently is an interesting one. The rock art of the Maloti-Drakensberg region nevertheless hints at this. One indicator is the association of dogs with horses, either directly (Vinnicombe 1976:70–71, 253) or indirectly (when painted in the same sites; Sam Challis, pers. comm.). If we assume that regular Bushman access to iron may have taken some time to take hold, then another is the frequent association of dogs with hunters armed with metal-tipped spears. Moreover, many of these hunt-ers (e.g., Lewis-Williams 1981:90) carry bladders in their hair, a dress style associated primarily with Bantu-speakers (Sam Challis, pers. comm.; Jolly 2006:70). Such observa-

tions can obviously not be conclusive, but they are certainly consistent with the model just outlined.

conclusion

Writing almost four decades ago, Rhys Jones (1970:270) looked forward to the development of “a cross-cultural analysis of the relationship between man and dog in various hunter-gatherer societies.” More recently, Kelly (1995:110) has hoped for the same. While this goal remains distant, it is one to which southern African data can and should contribute. The evidence reviewed here suggests some intriguing parallels with other parts of the world. The long exposure of southern Africa’s wildlife to many other placental mammalian carnivores and the existence of several indigenous canids probably prevented the arrival of the dog from having the same consequences as in Australia and, possibly (Fiedel 2005), North America; no extinctions followed (cf. Flannery 1994:276) and no feral dogs established themselves as a local equivalent to the dingo. On the other hand, there is relatively little evidence for southern African hunter-gatherers attributing to their dogs any of the mythical or ritual importance accorded dogs in parts of Australia and Tasmania (Jones 1970; Flood 1995:230–233) or, indeed, Mesolithic Europe (Whittle 1996:154–155). Instead, the situation more nearly parallels that of North America, where dogs were generally treated as technological aids, with their wild counterpart, the wolf, valued ritually and mythologically (Lopez 1978), a role played by lions and jackals (among carnivores) in Bushman belief. For south-ern African foragers I have argued that the principal role of the dog lay squarely in its ability to assist in the hunting of a select range of large and small game. Moreover, the dog’s behavioural and physical similarities to the wild dog, an animal with little mythological role but strongly negative associations for several Bushman groups, may have encouraged the primary assimilation of the dog in a technical, rather than a spiritual, capacity. Whether that assimilation proceeded quickly, slowly or at vastly differ-ent rates in different parts of southern Africa remains to be answered. The analogy of Tasmania (Jones 1970; Boyce 2006) suggests that take-up would have been rapid and effected through trade, natural increase and even theft. On the other hand, I have advanced some reasons why dogs may have increased in importance only as agropastoralist settlement intensified, and the rarity of dogs in parts of the Kalahari 40–50 years ago implies that the calculus of cost and benefit may often have weighed against dogs, at least where food supplies were more erratic, trading opportunities fewer and suitable prey less abundant than elsewhere. Future research should explore this among other questions.

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Acknowledgments. As one dog-lover to another, it is a pleasure to dedicate this paper to Ina Plug in gratitude for all her work with the faunas from my own excavations. I should also like to thank Shaw Badenhorst, Sam Challis, Kazunobu Ikeya and Gloria Ruggieri for their comments on an earlier draft and David Pearce for his help in providing Figure 4. Any remaining errors or omissions are mine alone.

Endnotes

1. This confusion may not be entirely due to some dogs resembling jackals in size and overall body shape as Simp-son (1945) reports that the two species can, on occasion, interbreed.

2. One relevant factor may have been that 1963-64 was a period of serious drought compared to the much better rains experienced in 1967–68 and even 1968–69 (Lee 1979:110). Perhaps if other kinds of game were less abundant, those species best suited to hunting with dogs took their place during the 1963–64 drought?

3. Interestingly, despite the fact that nineteenth century Maloti-Drakensberg Bushmen acquired horses and used them to hunt eland and other antelope (Vinnicombe 1976), there is no suggestion in the art that dogs were employed when hunting on horseback, though this is done today in the Kalahari (Osaki 2001).

4. Another explains how to cure a sick dog by treating it with crushed jackal plant berries that had been steeped in water (BC151_A2_1_096:7830–7831).

5. This behaviour was not universal among the /Xam, however. While Diä!kwain (a Grass Bushman) reported it, along with /Han≠kass’o, whose father was a Mountain Bushman, /Han≠kasss’o also commented that his father-in-law, //Kabbo, gave springbok shoulder-blades to the dogs, a reversal of the /nanna-sse observance. /Han≠kass’o also said that he started to do the same when he went to live with //Kabbo, but that his own grandfather (like //Kabbo, a Flat Bushman) had observed the prohibition. Whether we are looking here at genuine inter-group differences in ritual behaviour and attitude to dogs, or whether the differences were situationally specific in ways that are now beyond recovery, is unclear.

6. In addition to the three examples that I briefly discuss, Woodhouse (1990:120) draws attention to the image of a dog with a pair of long, slender tusks at Diana’s Vow, Zim-babwe, and to a second, ‘normal’ dog there that is closely associated with a tusked human figure. Tusked figures are probably linked with altered states of consciousness

(Lewis-Williams and Dowson 1989:66, 85), but their pre-cise significance remains obscure.

7. Of course, enough is known from Maloti-Drakensberg, /Xam and Kalahari sources to question whether any eland hunt was merely a matter of acquiring food. The use of eland fat and blood when making paint or tattooing newly graduated hunters, as well as the holding of medicine danc-es close to a freshly killed eland, are but three instances that show this (Lewis-Williams 1981; Lewis-Williams and Pearce 2004).

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The canine connection: dogs and people in southern African hunter-gatherer societies

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