First Dog on Earth by Irv Weinberg | 20 Oct 2020|Weeva Inc.
Set thirty thousand years ago, more or less, Irv Weinberg weaves a tale about Oohma, the first dog, born from a wolf, and pushed out of the pack with his littermates to fend for themselves. The story takes off from an archeological fact, that found in the Chauvet Cave in France along with its remarkable cave art were the fossilized tracks of a boy and a dog, a discovery that pushed the origins of man’s friendship with dogs back about 10 thousand years.1
Oohma and his pack move south away from the wolves and run into a human hunter/gatherer tribe moving north in the expansion from Africa that took place in the Upper Paleolithic (Late Stone Age). The author gives Oohma a lot of credit for reasoning and creative thought, more than he gives Ish, the aged hunter that the dog befriends by leaving him a fresh kill. Ish had been going off alone to hunt, no longer able to keep up with the young hunters of the tribe, and no longer useful by their standards. Being befriended by Oohma suddenly meant that he was able to provide better than anyone, even Hun, the alpha male of the tribe, who winds up getting pushed aside for leadership. Ish doesn’t just get the dog and leadership of the tribe, he gets Lut, the young medicine woman for a mate, and Oohma brings his pack in to join with the tribe.
The story takes two tracks. On one we watch Ish and Lut, often spurred by Oohma as they adopt everything from goat herding, courtesy of Oohma’s gathering wild goats, to growing wheat and baking bread. Some of this is explained by a gnostic experience Lut has when she eats some mushrooms and suddenly becomes aware of a wide range of homeopathic knowledge, some by Baba, a precious member of the tribe, and the artist whose paintings would someday be found by archeologists.
On the other track, Hun, the deposed younger leader finds a new tribe, but one that doesn’t know anything about flint knapping, trapping animals, or throwing spears. Though he tries to teach them they’re pretty hopeless, and what he really wants it to return to his own tribe in glory.
This is supposed to be Oohma’s story, and to some degree it is. Most of the book is from his viewpoint as he watches, nudges, and occasionally drags Ish and the others into modernity. The acts of affection that we associate with modern dogs come pre-wired here, the pleasurable connection between man and dog through touch and companionship, the wolflike cunning tempered by loyalty to a human, and ultimately the price that humans pay for giving their hearts to a dog.
Not as anthropologically astute as Clan of the Cave Bear, Weinberg packs an unreasonable amount of advancement into one dog’s lifespan. In his effort to show how dogs enabled humans to advance he sometimes loses sight of the emotional content of the story but seen through the eyes of a dog it’s not like you can go too far off the trail.
This is a perfect fit for Amazon’s Unlimited, which lets you read it free as part of your membership. It’s engaging, especially for anyone who loves dogs, but it’s not the first book on the subject, and you might consider The Dog Master: A Novel of the First Dog (2015) by W. Bruce Cameron after you read this for a different take on the subject set in much the same period.
1 Ancient Origins: 20 FEBRUARY, 2017 – 18:50 KERRY SULLIVAN | 26,000-Year-Old Child Footprints Found Alongside Paw Prints Reveal Oldest Evidence of Human-Canine Relationship