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consumption of Meat of dog It is a rare practice in current Western societies (except in cases of crisis or scarcity), although it is more common in some Eastern cultures. However, scientists from the Research Team of Atapuerca (EIA) have discovered that the inhabitants of the Burgos mountains fed on dogs sporadically from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age.
The researchers found different marks of human activity on a total of 130 dog bone remains recovered in domestic and funerary contexts identified in El Portalón de la Cueva Mayor de Atapuerca (Burgos).
According to the authors of the study, which is published in the journal ‘Archaelogical and Anthropological Sciences’, this evidence indicates that for 2,000 years the inhabitants of El Portalón consumed dog meat, although due to the small number of remains they believe they did. sporadically.
This consumption could be related to specific periods of food shortage or faminesbut also with rituals or for considering dog meat as a exquisiteness.
From a paleontological point of view, one of the main problems was to positively identify the dog remains (Canis lupus familiaris) and distinguish them from those of the wolf (Canis lupus lupus), the wild species from which the domestic form comes. There are hardly any morphological differences between the bony elements of both species and one of the diagnostic criteria that has made it possible to discriminate between them is size, since at that time the domestic dog was significantly smaller than the wolf.
The identification of the different marks carried out by Nohemi Sala, a researcher at the National Center for Research on Human Evolution (CENIEH), reveals cut marks, intentional fractures, evidence of alteration by fire, cooking and the presence of very possibly human bites.
oldest evidence
The consumption of dogs detected in the Neolithic levels of El Portalón (between 7,000 and 4,500 years old) is scarce, but it is one of the oldest evidences in the Iberian Peninsula together with that of the El Mirador site, also in the Sierra of Atapuerca.
Evidence from the Chalcolithic (5,000 to 4,000 years old) and Bronze Age (4,000 to 2,000 years old) levels is somewhat more abundant and shows that the inhabitants of the Sierra de Atapuerca, despite cultural changes, social, environmental and even population, practiced the canophagy in a sustained manner over time.
As a whole, the evidence provided by El Portalón supports a possible change in the use of the dog from the Neolithic, where cynophagia was barely observed, to later periods (Chalcolithic, Bronze) in which ritual use and consumption became more frequent.
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