More On First Dogs in America

“Even if you can’t imagine anything about the life of people 10,000 years ago, you can still understand the relationship between people and their dogs” 

Early this month, there was big discovery on first domestication of dogs in Americas and now, more on the same

While this is the oldest physical evidence for domesticated dogs in the Americas, the femur fragment doesn’t necessarily belong to one of the first dogs to make it over from northeast Asia. Back in 2018, the burial sites of several dogs in Illinois were found to be around 9,910 years old. With a difference of a mere couple centuries, the title of “oldest” now just barely belongs to the Alaskan pup PP-00128. But archaeologists are more interested in the fact that we now have very similarly aged dogs in two very different parts of North America. That means that dogs were coming to America much earlier than this—but when did they first arrive?

According to recently unveiled genetic evidence, around the time when a third of North America was buried beneath ice during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) roughly 26,500 to 19,000 years ago, people had increasing encounters with gray wolves in Siberia, where comparatively temperate refuges provided prey both could hunt down and eat. These wolves gradually became domesticated dogs sometime between about 40,000 and 19,000 years ago. (Ancient wolves that played with humans likely evolved into today's friendly dogs.)

As part of a multidisciplinary research project looking into the stories of the animals, climate, and environment of the region as the ice cover invaded and retreated, scientists are unspooling the genetics of bones excavated in the region, including those kept at the University of Alaska museum. Charlotte Lindqvist, an evolutionary biologist at the University at Buffalo and co-author of the new study, was interested in what bears were up to back then. One bone, specimen PP-00128, originally excavated from the site of Lawyer’s Cave on Alaska’s Blake Channel, was thought to belong to one.

While genetic analysis proved that PP-00128 did not belong to a bear, extraction of the dog’s complete nuclear DNA profile wasn’t possible from the tiny bone fragment. But its mitochondrial DNA—a small fraction of the entire genome inherited only from the maternal line—was retrieved. The multidisciplinary team’s analysis suggested the dog belonged to a lineage that split with its Siberian canine cousins no earlier than 16,700 years ago—roughly the time humans may have been traveling into North America along the coast.

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Given enough time, the vast wilderness of Alaska, through careful archaeological work, will also give up its secrets about the first arrivals of both humans and their canine companions.

“The answers to everything are sitting there just waiting,” says Perri. “There’s no animal that has the relationship with humans in the way dogs do, right?”

“The story of dogs is the story of humans,” she adds.