As featured in The Spectator, New York Magazine and the Daily Mail
The Children Of Wolves: How Men And Dogs Were Forged In The Land Of Ice is the new forthcoming book from award-winning author and naturalist Alexander Fiske-Harrison with images by the internationally acclaimed fine art photographer of the wild, David Yarrow.
“This was not just the first ‘domestication event’ as it is usually described. This was nothing less than the redefinition of humanity’s relationship with Nature itself in order to survive, and the forging of a deal that left both parties forever changed.”
THE CHILDREN OF WOLVES is a journey through the intertwined history of wolves and humans — how the wolf became the dog, and how we became ourselves beside it. From the first footprints in a cave in France — a child walking among prehistoric painting in torchlight beside a wolf 26,000 years ago — to modern conservation battles, military kennels, animal rescue centres, and the wolf within your own home, this book traces how our imagination, culture and very survival have been shaped by the first animal that chose to walk with us. Each chapter alternates between wolf and dog, shadow and companion. Wolves appear in myth and in reality: Transylvania’s Carpathians, where Dracula’s forests meet Europe’s last great wilderness; Yellowstone, where reintroduction reshaped rivers and returned the natural balance; Norway, where the world-wolf Fenrir – who devoured Odin himself – has a legend that shadows an inbred, embattled lupine population; Russia, where wolves fed on battlefields and live in folklore as killers in the snow; the Pyrenees and Alps, where they return to pastoral conflict; and the high Arctic, where the largest white wolves live unafraid in pure wilderness. The dog chapters mirror them: the first burials of wolf-turned-dog in Germany and Israel; the Red Zone kennels of East Anglia where dogs are retrained to avoid euthanasia, where aggression is remediated; SAS working dogs in Hereford, trained as comrades-in-war, weapon-made-warrior; on to gentle companions who are therapy animals, search-and-rescue partners and family; the sentinel role of the dog’s brain and senses, augmenting human weakness; and finally the tool and the trophy, from obedience drills to Crufts and Imperial lapdogs in China suckled by the Emperor’s concubines. This is a book of science, history, and personal witness: the authors living with wild wolves and beloved dogs, riding out into forests and steppes, training with soldiers and handlers, reflecting through neuroscience and archaeology. It is ambitious in scope, spanning from the last Ice Age art to modern rewilding, but intimate in focus, rooted in lived encounters with wolves and dogs. Echoes in the Ice shows how no invention — not fire, nor wheel, nor horse, nor machine — shaped us more than our alliance with the wolf, and how that bond continues to define us to this day.
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