A sight to get ancient stomachs growling? WENN

The remains of roasted, chopped and defleshed dog skulls in the Eurasian steppe are providing evidence of a bizarre rite of passage for young boys from 4000 years ago – one that might have echoes in the foundation myth of ancient Rome.

“The nature of this ritual was that they killed and then consumed very large numbers of dogs and some wolves with them,” says David Anthony at Hartwick College in New York.

Anthony and his Hartwick colleague Dorcas Brown analysed the bones of at least 64 different dogs and wolves. The remains came from a Bronze Age site roughly 3900 to 3700 years old, at the ancient village of Krasnosamarskoe in present-day Russia.


The researchers found that the dogs’ bodies appear to have been expertly chopped. The skulls alone were cut into about a dozen pieces after being roasted – almost all by the same method. Cut marks on some of the skull fragments show that the flesh may have been stripped from them after roasting, which Anthony says points to them having been eaten.

DNA analysis shows most of the dogs were male, which Anthony says suggests a male initiation rite. The killings may not have occurred every year, but the fact that the remains were stratified in the soil suggests the same process was done several times.

The dogs were killed mostly during the winter, based on chemical analysis of their teeth, while cattle and sheep bones discovered with them were killed throughout the year. This also hints that the dog killing was not just for meat, but for some sort of ritual purpose.

Canine culture

In 2015, Anthony and Brown contributed to a study of ancient DNA that suggests Bronze-Age humans moved westwards from the Eurasian steppe about 4500 years ago, leaving a significant genetic imprint on European populations. The archaeological evidence suggests the steppe communities may have had a cultural impact on Europeans too.

For instance, prehistoric myths from some European Celtic cultures involve a rite of passage for young males being initiated into war bands before going out to raid neighbouring settlements. The practice is also mentioned in early Greek texts. Many of these rituals involved the boys transforming themselves symbolically into dogs or wolves, possibly after sacrificing these animals, says Anthony. “They have temporary names that translate to dog or wolf during this initiatory period – and they’re referred to using dog or wolf metaphors,” he says.

Eating dogs was probably considered taboo by the ancient Eurasian steppe communities – particularly given that such remains have not been discovered at other ancient sites in the region. Anthony says that if the taboo was broken, it must have been in a ritual context. The canines were also quite old, and show evidence of relatively good treatment – he says it’s even possible that the boys ate their own pets.

Zaur Hasanov at the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography in Azerbaijan offers a different interpretation.

He says that ancient steppe culture had a well-known tradition of ritually butchering human bodies before burial. “This butchering of human skeletons can be associated with the Siberian ritual of the symbolic death of a Shaman, when spirits cut his, or her body into very small pieces,” he says. The fact that older dogs and wolves were selected could mean they represented ancestral spirits of shamans, he says.

Anthony says that is unlikely, because shamanism is not strongly sex-biased but the remains of the dogs and wolves are. He also argues that the evidence for this type of shamanistic ritual comes from recent Siberian tribes, rather than archaeology or ancient texts.

Anthony says the institution of youthful war bands based on wolves was around long after this Eurasian steppe culture disappeared. They even pop up in the founding myth of Rome, in which young boys Romulus and Remus are brought up by a wolf – with Romulus eventually rounding up a band of itinerant boys and creating the city that bears his name.

“The myths of the founding of Rome are full of references to youthful war bands,” he says.

Journal reference: Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, DOI: 10.1016/j.jaa.2017.07.004

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