What is the name of the dog owned by the cave people?

Answer 1

That's a tricky question. So far as I know, scientists are still debating the origin of dogs. Some people believe that cave people would sometimes bring home a wolf puppy to raise, and that from those tame wolves, dogs slowly developed. Some people believe that dogs and wolves have a common ancestor, before there were really dogs or really wolves, and that both dogs and wolves descended from the common ancestor, and that it is really the ancestral dogs that got tamed. Some people believe that wolves (or ancestral dogs) sort of tamed themselves, that some of them took to hanging around human campsites for the scraps and bones they could scavenge.

Modern anecdotal evidence suggests that some wolves are a lot more submissive and friendly to humans than others, especially if they are at the bottom of the pack heirarchy. Omega wolves (the term for the very lowest-ranking ones) can be severely bullied, injured, or even driven out of the pack--back in cave-people days they might then have turned to humans to survive. Modern people who capture a wolf and raise it generally find out that it was a very bad idea (and also a bad idea to breed half-wolf or quarter-wolf puppies), but the wolf they capture would be basically a random one; they wouldn't be living next to wild wolves for years and letting one slowly get closer to them if it chose to.

In any case, there isn't a special name for the original proto-dog/wolf/cave pets. The dogs most similar to them today would be dogs that live in remote areas of the world, where their types would develop naturally. There would always be some selection by humans--for instance, unfriendly ones, ones that drove game animals away, or ones that viewed human kids as lunch would not live to reproduce. But the less deliberate selection by humans, the more they would resemble the earliest dogs. Dingos, Carolina Dogs, Indian Dholes, Basenjis, and New Guinea Singing Dogs would be examples.