Who has never dreamed of befriending a pack of wolves? Surely, all of us who grew up watching Félix Rodríguez de la Fuente have done so at some time. But the relationship between wolf and man comes from further afield.
We are talking about a story that began thousands of years ago, although there is still no scientific consensus on the exact time and place in which the domestication of the wolf began, on when that journey began in which we would discover man’s best friend.
A study that made headlines around the world was published in the journal Science in 2013 and claimed that the man and wolf friendship was a process that began in Europe 19,000 years ago. In their work, the scientists compared the genetic sequences of many contemporary dog breeds with those extracted from the fossils of 18 prehistoric canids , up to 36,000 years old, in Asia, Europe and other regions of the world. The results concluded that modern dogs are more closely linked to the genetic chain of ancient European wolves than to those of other areas.
In 2015 a new work refuted the Science article and concluded that the origin of the domestication of man was much earlier and began 27,000 to 40,000 years ago in Siberia. To do this, they analyzed a wolf bone found on the Taimyr Peninsula and discovered that it was 35,000 years old. On the other hand, genetic analysis revealed that the current breed of dog known as the Siberian husky is closely related to this ancestral wolf. The results of this study were published in the journal Current Biology .
Who knows … maybe future discoveries will make us rewrite the history of the friendship of the man and the wolf, but it seems clear that this goes back many thousands of years. While we let the scientists trace the true origin of the encounter with this charismatic animal, we find precious examples, real and fictional, that tell stories of friendship between the wolf and the human being.
One of them is the common thread of ALPHA, a new film directed by Albert Hughes that transports us to the last ice age. A young man separated from his tribe forms an unusual friendship with a wolf abandoned by his pack. The two of them will learn to trust each other, become allies, and overcome myriad dangers to, against all odds, find their way home before deadly winter hits.
