Dogs in ancient America

I have been fascinated with the prehistory of America for many years.  Above is a Native American pictograph from Northern Oregon showing dogs herding deer to a waiting hunter. The archeological record is full of evidence that the man-dog relationship goes back many millennia. Interesting to speculate just how long ago this relationship began. Recent evidence suggests more than 100,000 years - long before the domestication of any other animal.

A true American wild dog?

Old news to some people, but new to me is the 'discovery' and investigation of the Carolina dog...

Dr. I. Lehr Brisbin Jr., a Senior Research Ecologist at the University of Georgia's Savannah River Ecology Lab, first came across a Carolina Dog while working at the Savannah River site. Horace, a stray white dog with brown markings, was wandering the site’s boundary when he caught Brisbin’s attention. Brisbin, who had seen many rural dogs chained to the back of porches and doghouses, assumed this was just a normal stray. Many of these dogs roamed the woods and would turn up in humane traps, and Brisbin began to wonder how many more of these were in the wild. On a hunch, he went to the pound and was surprised by the resemblance the dog had to dingoes.

The preliminary DNA testing provided an intriguing link between primitive dogs and Carolina Dogs. Brisbin stated, “We grabbed them out of the woods based on what they look like, and if they were just dogs their DNA patterns should be well distributed throughout the canine family tree. But they aren't. They're all at the base of the tree, where you would find very primitive dogs.” This wasn’t conclusive, but it did spark interest into more extensive DNA testing.

The exciting idea remains a hypothesis, one that's under examination by an analysis of fossils, cave paintings, and other pieces of the North American historical record. Early paintings of Native Americans, for example, show accompanying dogs whose appearance looks strikingly like today's Carolina Dogs.

Another suggestive piece of evidence is comparison with dogs that remain on the other side of the long vanished Asia-North America land connection."It's a hypothesis," Brisbin stressed, "but we might infer that if dogs look similar on both sides of the Bering Strait land bridge, maybe our first American dogs came over from that area." On Chindo Island, Korea, local free-ranging dogs exist that have apparently been free from hybridization by other breeds. "That native Korean breed, the chindo-kae, is indistinguishable from Carolina Dogs, Brisbin noted. "If they were mixed in a group, I couldn't tell who was who."

The distinctive appearance of Carolina Dogs is not their only link to the world's surviving primitive breeds. Brisbin's studies have also revealed behaviors not observed in domestic dogs.

For more... National Geographic

Early origin of dogs pushed back...

Plowing around, looking for the origins of domestic dogs, I found this bit on ScienceNews.org. 

People have long wondered about the circumstances that led prehistoric dogs to come, sit, and permanently stay, thus creating the first human-animal bond. Researchers have generally based their interpretation of the origins of the domesticated dog on archaeological records. In the past decade, however, molecular biologists have started to study canine DNA to trace the complex ancestry of the more than 400 dog breeds and related canine species.

Dog genes are telling a radically different story from dog bones. An analysis in the June 13 Science concludes that dogs were domesticated much earlier than archaeologists maintain. Instead of a 10,000- to 20,000-year time frame, Robert K. Wayne of the University of California, Los Angeles and his colleagues now have evidence that dogs could have been domesticated 100,000 years ago -- if not earlier.

That conclusion has raised some hackles.

"I'm flabbergasted," says Brisbin.

"It's bound to be controversial because it's such an early date," says Marion Schwartz of Yale University. Schwartz's book, A History of Dogs in the Early Americas (Yale University Press), was released this month.

Other researchers find the result convincing, however surprising. The report "has really very compelling data," says Elaine Ostrander, a molecular biologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle who is collaborating on a study of the dog genome. "It's a fascinating and exciting story."