Thousands of Years Ago, Humans Were Vibing With Wolves on this Remote Island

On this rocky island in the Baltic Sea, wolves lived among and dependent on humans.

It’s five thousand years ago, and a group of humans were living on a limestone rock in the Baltic Sea in Northern Europe rock. The island, Stora Karlsö, is a small one; barely a speck on the map, smaller than Central Park. It is a harsh, isolated place, a seasonal outpost for hunters chasing seals and sea birds.

But humans weren’t alone. Curled up near the warmth of fires, or perhaps pacing around, there were a few wolves. These wolves weren’t hunting on the island. They were stranded with almost no prey, waiting for humans to toss them some food.

For a century, archaeologists thought these bones belonged to dogs. It makes a lot of sense as dogs are our oldest friends. But new research shows they were wolves, and they were living under human control, eating a diet that only humans could provide.

“The discovery of these wolves on a remote island is completely unexpected,” said Dr. Linus Girdland-Flink of the University of Aberdeen, a lead author of the study. “Not only did they have ancestry indistinguishable from other Eurasian wolves, but they seemed to be living alongside humans, eating their food, and in a place they could have only have reached by boat. This paints a complex picture of the relationship between humans and wolves in the past.”

Here, Wolfie, Wolfie

The story begins in the late 19th century, deep in the sediment layers of the Stora Förvar cave. Excavators found thousands of bones, mostly from seals, but also from cattle, pigs, and canids. In the 1920s, researchers analyzing these canid bones made a bold claim: these looked like wolves.

For decades, that claim sat in the archives. As the years passed, researchers noted that distinguishing early dogs from wolves by bone shape alone is very difficult. It seemed far more likely that these were just large dogs. But Girdland-Flink and colleagues wanted to investigate.

“This caught our attention because there is no evidence in the archaeological record that wolves ever lived on these islands, neither the larger island of Gotland nor the nearby island of Stora Karlsö, where these remains were found,” the researcher told ZME Science. “So it was definitely something we wanted to test with DNA analyses.”

When it was all said and done, the DNA analysis clearly showed that these were wolves. This confirmation created a geographical puzzle. Stora Karlsö is located about 80 kilometers from the Swedish mainland. While wolves can swim, they aren’t marine mammals. The distance is at the absolute “extreme upper edge” of what is biologically plausible for a wolf to swim, even with ice bridges. Furthermore, the island is only 2.5 square kilometers. It has no endemic terrestrial mammals; no deer, no moose, no rabbits for a wolf to hunt. A wild wolf arriving here naturally would starve.

Yet, here they were. And they didn’t just survive; they were living.

You Are What You Eat

If you want to know who someone is, look at their DNA. If you want to know how they lived, look at their isotopes.

These isotopes act as a chemical diary of an animal’s diet. A wolf in the wild forest eats terrestrial herbivores like deer or elk. Its chemical signature reflects that land-based diet. The Stora Karlsö wolves, however, were eating from the sea.

Wolves are capable of scavenging on beaches, but they cannot deep-sea fish. They cannot catch seals in open water. For them to have this type of diet must mean that someone gave it to them.

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Humans must have engaged with wild wolves in a way that is not readily recognizable in most archaeological contexts, Girdland-Flink told ZME Science. “This suggests that the people who used or occupied Stora Karlsö at least occasionally interacted with wolves in a manner that implies they exerted some degree of control over these animals.”

Another wolf individual shows an even clearer sign. Her skeleton showed signs of advanced pathology — a bad injury to her leg that would have severely reduced her mobility. In the brutal calculus of the wild, she would have been unable to hunt or keep up with a pack. Yet, she lived.

She lived because she was fed.

Why Feed a Wolf?

This stunning case muddies the waters of domestication history in the most fascinating way.

We tend to think of domestication as a one-way street: humans take wolves, they interact, they breed them for friendliness, and some generations later you have poodles and retrievers. But on this island, the relationship between humans and wolves existed in a gray zone.

“Our data and findings suggest that complex wolf-human interactions may have been more common in the past than we currently assume. We can only speculate about the extent to which this occurred elsewhere, but it nevertheless provides an important insight into past wolf-human relationships,” Girdland-Flink explained in an email.

These wolves were not dogs. They retained the genetic diversity of the wild. They were a bit smaller, possibly because of their diet, but showed no signs of turning into dogs.

This raises a psychological question: Why keep a wolf?

The site was a hunting station. Perhaps the wolves were used to help track seals, though that seems unlikely given the terrain. Perhaps they were status symbols, ritual objects, or simply curiosities captured as pups and raised by hand.

The findings also challenge the idea that wolves only became “tame” by hanging around trash heaps (the commensal pathway). These wolves almost certainly didn’t happen to be on the island; they were brought there. This supports the “direct pathway” theory, where humans deliberately reared wolf pups.

It’s not clear if this was an isolated case or not. But on this rocky island in the Baltic Sea, wolves lived among humans. They ate our food and likely interacted with us, all the while remaining, at least genetically, wild creatures.

“It would be very interesting to see whether similar scenarios can be found elsewhere in the world, and to explore the extent to which this type of wolf-human relationship may have occurred in Scandinavia,” the researcher concludes.

The study was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. DOI 10.1073/pnas.2421759122