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0152 Explorations in Turkestan : Expedition of 1904 : vol.2
Explorations in Turkestan : Expedition of 1904 : vol.2 / Page 152 (Grayscale High Resolution Image)

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doi: 10.20676/00000178
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350   ANIMAL REMAINS FROM THE EXCAVATIONS AT ANAU.

According to the table the skull from Anau ranks directly behind the subfossil cranium from Olmütz, the original skull of Jeitteles.

The domesticated dog of Anau belongs accordingly to the subspecies of Canis f arniliaris matris optimce in a form which stands craniologically very near to the dingo and to Canis poutiatini Studer, but which is distinguished by a rather broad muzzle.

But how does Canis matris optimce come to be among the inhabitants of the Anau kurgans? Judging from the very scant material thus far in hand, there

can be no question that this dog did not originate at Anau during the first culture period. It is much more probable that it came to Anau with the people who brought thither the camel and the goat.

But how came the dog in the possession of that people, and whence came they? These questions can not be answered from the material in hand. One

would have to know with certainty whether the pariah dog, the modern street dog of the East, which we know on the oldest monuments of Egypt, is directly related to the shepherd-dog.

Th. Studer* assumes merely a parallelism in development and derives the pariah dog direct from the dingo, which he considers to have been distributed in former times over all southern Asia, where it still occurred even in most recent times in the Tengger Mountains of Java. He believes, further, that in Eurasia in the diluvial period there existed a small wild dog which he has recently designated Canis poutiatini. This species is said to have shown itself to be more easily tamed than the wolf and from this he derives, on the one hand, Canis palustris and on the other the shepherd-dog. Jeittelest himself thought that the Canis matris optimæ might have been derived from the Indian wolf (Canis pallipes Sykes), and assumes that the domestication of this animal took place in ancient Iran. Our finds in Anau might seem to lend a greater degree of probability to this idea, but the direct measurements and ratios given above show that the Indian wolf stands very far from the Anau dog. We must, therefore, waver between two opinions, namely, that the theory advanced by Studer,$ in which he derives the shepherd-dog from a paleolithic dog of Russia (Canis poutiatini) is correct; or that the dingo, which we have represented as being similar to our dog from Anau, must have lived in southern Asia in some form, and that from it both the pariah dog and the shepherd-dog have descended.

Which view is correct we can not, as I have already said, decide with certainty from the Anau remains alone. Derivation from Canis poutiatini is favored not only by the similarity in the measurements but also by the fact that the dog was brought to Anau by a people who imported the camel and the goat. Considering the localities of fossil remains thus far found, and the present geographical distribution of these animals, it is possible that the camel came from the south or east, and the goat from the south or west, since its wild form now lives in Persia

*Ueber den deutschen Schaeferhund und einigen kynologischen Fragen. Mitteilungen Naturf. Gesell., p. i I. Bern, 1903.

tCf. Jeitteles, Die vorgesch. Altert. d. Stadt Olinütz, pp. 56-80. Wien, 1872. Keller, Die Abstammung d. aeltesten Haustiere, p. 55. Zürich, 1902.

Zoolog. Anzeiger, Bd. xxix, z, pp. 27-30.