Bronze Age Teens Ate Dogs to Become Men

(Credit: Shutterstock) Some 4,000 years ago in the Russian steppe, the relationship between man and dog was, you could say, complicated. It seems in that time and place, as a rite of passage into manhood, teenage boys were sent to a ritual site to “transform” into dogs by eating their flesh. This is the new interpretation, presented in an upcoming paper in the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, of roasted and chopped bones from at least 64 dogs and wolves, found at the Bronze Age site of Krasnosamarskoe (Kras-no-sa-MAR-sko-yeh), north of the Caspian Sea in the Russian steppe. Initiation rites, in which boys lived in the wild, acting like wolves and dogs, are described in ancient texts of Greek, Latin, Germanic, Celtic, Iranian, and Vedic Sanskrit—all Indo-European cultures that descended from the same ancestral group. Dog- and wolf-themed initiations were “very widespread in Indo-European mythology,” says archaeologist David Anthony, who coauthored the study with Dorcas Brown, both of Hartwick College, New York. “This seems to be the first site where we have concrete evidence for the actual existence of this kind of practice.” Moreover, finding a common Indo-European ritual of this age, in this region, adds support to a debated hypothesis: that Indo-European peoples originated on the Pontic-Caspian steppe and spread across Eurasia, aided by their invention of horse-drawn, wheeled vehicles.