Man’s Best Friend: Human-Dog Ties in the Americas are 12,000 Years Old
A new study has revealed that the cooperative bond between humans and canines in the Americas may date back as far as the Late Pleistocene, some 12,000 years ago. This pushes back the evidence of our first interspecies interactions by some two millennia.
The study, led by Dr. François Lanoë from the University of Arizona’s School of Anthropology, concentrates on the archaeology from Alaska. Evidence has been found that clearly suggests early cooperation between the indigenous peoples and canids, not so much the ancestors of today’s dogs as partially domesticated wolves.
Much of the evidence comes from the bones of the dogs themselves. Two finds, one 12,000 years old near Fairbanks, Alaska’s second largest city, and another dated to 8,100 years ago, are telling.
Analysis of the jawbones of both of these animals reveals a surprising fact: they were eating salmon. And while it is not impossible for wolves to catch salmon themselves it is an extremely odd choice of meal for a wild wolf.
The researchers consider it much more likely that the salmon diet came from the dogs’ reliance on humans for their food. The team consider it among the first firm evidence for this cooperation at this early stage, close to the end of the last Ice Age.
However, the picture is not so simple as all that. The remains of these animals was subject to further genetic and DNA testing and the results were unexpected.
These are not, in fact, the ancestors of our dogs today. It seems more likely that these were a population of wolves who saw the benefit of coexisting with humans but who eventually died out. Dogs, our dogs, came from elsewhere.
In recent years there have been several finds which suggest that domestication was more common than had perhaps been thought. In Patagonia in 2003 the remains of another canid, this time an extinct fox, was found in close proximity to humans.
Like these canids of Alaska, the fox is unrelated to modern dogs. But the fox also saw the advantage of living closely with the hunters of the area, choosing domestication as a safer and more advantageous lifestyle than hunting alone.
With all these new finds, it would seem that canids of all forms were keen to work together with man. Our Best Friend for at least 12,000 years.
Original Study: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.ads1335.
Header Image: The canids found in Alaska date back 12,000 years ago, but Man’s Best Friend then was likely a domesticated wolf population, not the ancestors of modern dogs. Source: son_gismo / CC BY 2.0.
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