National Institute of Informatics - Digital Silk Road Project
Digital Archive of Toyo Bunko Rare Books

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

*The domesticated dog of Anau belongs accordingly to the subspecies of Canis
familiaris matris optimæ 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 optimæ* 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. Jeitteles† 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 dis-
tribution 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