Rosa Rubicondior: As Anticipated In My Novels - Wolves Lived With Humans 3,000-5,000 Years Ago

Wednesday, 31 December 2025

As Anticipated In My Novels - Wolves Lived With Humans 3,000-5,000 Years Ago

Illustration from "The Way of the Wolf: A Stone Age Epic"

Ancient wolves on remote Baltic Sea island reveal link to prehistoric humans - Stockholms universitet

This article struck a chord with me — not primarily because it refutes creationism, although it certainly does that by presenting evidence that simply should not exist if the biblical flood genocide story contained even a kernel of truth. Such evidence ought either to have been swept away entirely or buried beneath a thick layer of flood-deposited silt containing a chaotic jumble of animal and plant fossils from unrelated landmasses. It was neither.

What resonated more personally, however, is that I have just published a novel in which a clan of Neolithic hunter-gatherers forms a close association with wolves, with the animals playing a central role in both their hunting strategies and their folklore. In the novel, The Way of the Wolf: A Stone Age Epic — the second volume in the Ice Age Tales series — Almora is raised alongside a wolf cub that becomes her inseparable guide and protector. This relationship gives rise to several versions of a mythologised hunt in which the wolf, Sharma, saves the day and defends the hunters. Together with her Neanderthal partner, Tanu, Almora later leads a group of exiles who encounter a clan already familiar with these legends, and who have begun adopting abandoned wolf cubs and raising them as part of the community.

It is fiction, of course — but a deliberately realistic depiction of how wolves could have been domesticated through mutual benefit, cooperation, and prolonged social contact with humans.

The article itself concerns the discovery by researchers at the Francis Crick Institute, Stockholm University, the University of Aberdeen, and the University of East Anglia of wolf remains on a remote Baltic island that could only have been transported there by boat. Isotopic analysis shows that these wolves consumed the same food as the humans, and skeletal pathology in one individual indicates long-term care. The findings are reported in a research paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

The domestication of wolves and the origin of dogs.

The Domestication and Origin of the Modern Day Dog

Source.

Dogs were the first domesticated animals, originating from grey wolves through a long, complex process that began during the Late Pleistocene. Current evidence places the start of domestication at least **20,000–30,000 years ago**, well before agriculture and long before permanent settlements.

How domestication likely began

The dominant model today is self-domestication via commensalism, not deliberate human capture or breeding. Some wolves were less fearful and more tolerant of humans and began scavenging near hunter-gatherer camps. These wolves gained a selective advantage from access to food, while humans benefited from:

Early warning of predators or rival groups
Assistance in tracking and hunting prey
Disposal of waste around camps

Over generations, natural selection favoured wolves with reduced aggression, increased sociability, and greater responsiveness to human cues.

Archaeological evidence

Clear archaeological indicators include intentional burials and skeletal changes:

At Bonn-Oberkassel (c. 14,200 years ago), a dog was buried alongside two humans, indicating social and emotional significance rather than utility alone.
Early dog remains show shorter snouts, smaller teeth, and altered cranial proportions compared with wolves—classic markers of domestication.

Genetic evidence

Genomic studies confirm that dogs descend from wolves, but not from any single modern wolf population. Instead:

Dogs retain genetic signatures from now-extinct wolf populations.
There is evidence of multiple domestication events or extensive gene flow between early dogs and regional wolves.
Genes involved in behaviour, neural development, and stress response were among the earliest to change—supporting a behavioural rather than physical starting point.

Behaviour came first

Crucially, dogs were domesticated before traits like floppy ears, coat colour variation, or curled tails appeared. These later features are by-products of selection on behaviour, a pattern also seen in classic domestication experiments (e.g. foxes selected only for tameness).

Why this matters

Wolf domestication shows that:

Complex biological change can occur without intention or foresight
Mutual benefit can drive profound evolutionary outcomes
Human–animal cooperation predates civilisation itself

Rather than humans “designing” dogs, dogs and humans co-evolved, shaping each other’s behaviour, ecology, and survival strategies over tens of thousands of years.

This makes dog domestication one of the clearest, best-documented examples of natural selection operating through social and ecological interaction, not intelligent planning or directed design.

They are also summarised in a Stockholm University news release.

Ancient wolves on remote Baltic Sea island reveal link to prehistoric humans
Scientists have found wolf remains, thousands of years old, on a small, isolated island in the Baltic Sea – a place where the animals could only have been brought by humans. The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by researchers at the Francis Crick Institute, Stockholm University, the University of Aberdeen and the University of East Anglia, suggests that grey wolves may have been managed or controlled by prehistoric societies.
The discovery of the 3,000–5,000-year-old wolf remains was made in the Stora Förvar cave on the Swedish island of Stora Karlsö, a site known for its intensive use by seal hunters and fishers during the Neolithic and Bronze Ages. The island, which covers only 2.5 square kilometres, has no native land mammals, meaning that any such animals must have been brought there by people.

Detail of one of the upper arm bones from one of the wolves included in the study.

Photo: Jan Storå

Genomic analysis of two canid remains confirmed they were wolves, not dogs, with no evidence of dog ancestry. However, they exhibited several traits typically associated with life alongside humans. Isotope analysis of their bones revealed a diet rich in marine protein, such as seals and fish, aligning with the diet of the humans on the island and suggesting they were provisioned. Furthermore, the wolves were smaller than typical mainland wolves, and one individual showed signs of low genetic diversity, a common result of isolation or controlled breeding.

Wolves living alongside humans

The discovery of these wolves on a remote island is completely unexpected. Not only did they have ancestry indistinguishable from other Eurasian wolves, but they seemed to be living alongside humans, eating their food, and in a place they could have only have reached by boat. This paints a complex picture of the relationship between humans and wolves in the past.

Dr. Linus Girdland-Flink, co-lead author
Department of Archaeology
University of Aberdeen
Aberdeen, UK.

The finding challenges the conventional understanding of wolf-human dynamics and the process of dog domestication. While it remains unclear if these wolves were tamed, kept in captivity, or managed in some other way, their presence in a human-occupied, isolated environment points to a deliberate and sustained interaction.

It was a complete surprise to see that it was a wolf and not a dog. This is a provocative case that raises the possibility that in certain environments, humans were able to keep wolves in their settlements, and found value in doing so.

Pontus Skoglund, senior author.
Ancient Genomics Laboratory
The Francis Crick Institute
London, UK.

The genetic data is fascinating. We found that the wolf with the most complete genome had low genetic diversity, lower than any other ancient wolf we’ve seen. This is similar to what you see in isolated or bottlenecked populations, or in domesticated organisms. While we can’t rule out that these wolves had low genetic diversity for natural reasons, it suggests that humans were interacting with and managing wolves in ways we hadn’t previously considered.

Anders Bergström, co-lead author
School of Biological Sciences
University of East Anglia
Norwich. UK.

May have been cared for
One of the wolf specimens, dated to the Bronze Age, also showed advanced pathology in a limb bone, which would have limited its mobility. This suggests it may have been cared for or was able to survive in an environment where it did not need to hunt large prey.

The combination of osteology and genetic analyses have provided unique information not available separately.

The combination of data has revealed new and very unexpected perspectives on Stone Age and Bronze Age human-animal interactions in general and specifically concerning wolves and also dogs.

Professor Jan Storå, co-author
Department of Archaeology and Classical Studies
Stockholm University
Stockholm, Sweden.

The study suggests that human-wolf interactions in prehistory were more diverse than previously thought, extending beyond simple hunting or avoidance to include complex relations and interactions that, in this case, mirrors new aspects of domestication without leading to the canines we know as dogs today.

Publication:
L. Girdland-Flink, A. Bergström, J. Storå, E. Ersmark, J. Apel, M. Krzewińska, L. Dalén, A. Götherström, & P. Skoglund
Gray wolves in an anthropogenic context on a small island in prehistoric Scandinavia
Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 122 (48) e2421759122, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2421759122 (2025).

Significance
Wolves, the wild ancestor of dogs, are the only large carnivores that have undergone domestication by humans. Yet, it remains unclear if this process took place via direct and deliberate human control of wild wolves or if wolf populations gradually adapted to the human niche. Here, we report two canid individuals with gray wolf genetic ancestry excavated from a human archaeological site on a small isolated island in the Baltic Sea dated to between three and 5,000 y ago. The remote island location in combination with the anthropogenic burial context, low genome-wide heterozygosity, marine-rich diet, and small size, are all consistent with a scenario in which these individuals were under human control, but other explanations are also possible.

Abstract
Dogs were domesticated at least once from a yet-unidentified wolf population at least ~15,000 y ago. However, how domestication took place is a topic of ongoing debate, and the ability of human groups to manage wolves in their communities during early stages of domestication is poorly understood. Here, we report multiproxy data from two canids excavated from Late Neolithic and Bronze Age contexts in the Stora Förvar cave on the island of Stora Karlsö in the Baltic Sea. The island is small (2.5 sq km) and, like the neighboring island of Gotland, carries no endemic populations of terrestrial mammals. Instead, the current consensus is that human introductions account for some mammal fauna on Gotland, and for the majority of that on Stora Karlsö. Genome-wide data show that the two canids have ancestry indistinguishable from Eurasian wolves, with no shared ancestry with domestic dogs of the Canis familiaris lineage. Their genome-wide heterozygosity is lower than that observed in 72 previously published ancient wolf genomes, and instead comparable to dogs. Stable isotope data (δ¹³C and δ¹⁵N) reveals a diet rich in marine protein, which is consistent with habitation alongside the human groups who used Stora Karlsö as a seal-hunting, fowling, and sea fishing station, and in the Bronze Age probably also for grazing. Skeletal size is at the lower end of wolf variability, and one individual shows advanced pathology consistent with reduced mobility. While other scenarios are possible, a parsimonious explanation is that these wolves were brought to the island by humans and were possibly under human control.

(A) Map showing the location of Gotland, Stora Karlsö and Öland in the Baltic Sea. The gray area shows the reconstructed shoreline approximately 9,000 cal BP (12). (B) A range plot of humeral greatest distal breadth (Bd) in modern and ancient dogs and wolves, including a wolf-dog hybrid from the comparative dataset used by Pira (9) (SI Appendix, Table S3). (C) δ¹³C and δ¹⁵N stable isotope values of a representative sample of dogs, humans, and fauna from approximately contemporaneous archaeological sites on Gotland, Stora Karlsö and Öland, and Mesolithic dogs from mainland Sweden and Denmark (SI Appendix, Table S4). PWC=Pitted Ware Culture, TRB=Trichterbecherkultur or Funnel Beaker Culture (Early to Middle Neolithic), MN = Middle Neolithic, LN = Late Neolithic, BA = Bronze Age. See SI Appendix, Table S1 for archaeological periods and associated calendar years.

L. Girdland-Flink, A. Bergström, J. Storå, E. Ersmark, J. Apel, M. Krzewińska, L. Dalén, A. Götherström, & P. Skoglund
Gray wolves in an anthropogenic context on a small island in prehistoric Scandinavia
Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 122 (48) e2421759122, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2421759122 (2025).

Copyright: © 2025 The authors.
Published by the Nationla Academy of Science of the USA. Open access.
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)

These wolf remains from a Baltic island add yet another awkward complication for creationists who insist that all terrestrial animals were wiped out by a single, recent global flood and then rapidly dispersed from a Middle Eastern landing point. Wolves are highly mobile animals, but they are not magical ones. Their presence on an island that was intermittently isolated by rising post-glacial sea levels requires either land bridges at specific times, seasonal ice crossings, or sustained ecological continuity — all of which are well understood within Quaternary palaeoecology and none of which are compatible with a planet-wide inundation followed by a frantic, ahistorical repopulation event a few thousand years ago.

Under the flood myth, these wolves should not be there at all. Any pre-Flood population would have been exterminated, and any post-Flood recolonisation would require implausibly rapid migration, precise timing of land exposure, and the immediate establishment of viable prey populations — all without leaving the chaotic sedimentary and fossil signatures that a global catastrophe of that scale would necessarily produce. Instead, what we see is exactly what evolutionary biology, palaeogeography, and archaeology predict: a gradual, traceable history of animal movement tracking climate change, ice retreat, and shifting coastlines.

What makes this particularly satisfying is that none of this comes as a surprise. In my second novel in the Ice Age Tales series, The Way of the Wolf, I explored precisely this long-standing relationship between humans and wolves — not as a sudden or miraculous partnership, but as one forged over deep time, shaped by shared landscapes, shared pressures, and mutual advantage. The archaeological and palaeontological record increasingly supports that picture: wolves were not late arrivals blundering into a post-Flood world, but long-term companions of human groups navigating the complex geography of the post-Ice Age north.

Once again, the evidence is quietly but firmly doing what it always does: reinforcing a coherent, testable account of the past while leaving creationist mythology scrambling for ever more contrived excuses. The wolves on the Baltic island do not merely tell us where wolves once lived; they tell us, indirectly but unmistakably, that the Flood never happened — and that the real story of our shared past with them is far older, richer, and more interesting than any Bronze Age fable.

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