How long ago the bond between dog and man was first formed is something scientists haven’t been able to ascertain.
New research involving Kelsey Witt Dillon, an assistant professor in the Clemson University Department of Genetics and Biochemistry and the Center for Human Genetics, is part of new research that now suggests indigenous people in interior Alaska had formed relationships with the ancestors of today’s dogs near the end of the Ice Age — a time at least 2,000 years earlier than previously thought.
“Dogs were the first animal to be domesticated, but it was so long ago that we don’t really know the details of when and how,” said Witt Dillon, a computational biologist and population geneticist whose research focuses on the history of dogs in the Americas. “Any time we come across archeological samples of canids — dogs, wolves or coyotes — we’re interested in learning more about them and their relationship with humans to try to shed light on that.”
The researchers used a database of 111 large canid specimens. Included was the tibia of an adult canine about 12,000 years old and an 8,100-year-old canine jawbone excavated. The scientists determined that the canines from which these two bones came from had regularly eaten salmon, a diet choice that wasn’t typical of canine, who typically hunted land animals for food. Researchers say these dogs likely were fed by humans or scavenged salmon left by humans.
“We have evidence that sometimes people had a very loose association with dogs, where the dogs would be around, but they didn’t have owners and they weren’t being actively managed in any way,” she said. “It was a relationship where the humans had some benefit from the dogs being around, maybe some protection from wolves, and the dogs got food and a bit of safety, too. The pet idea is newer and the breeds as we know them are newer.”
Witt Dillon said the goal of the project was to consider different lines of evidence at once to try get a picture of what human-dog and human-wolf interactions were like.
“We see a lot of evidence of people feeding dogs and taking care of them, and we see this through time. People have valued dogs for thousands of years. I think it’s a cool thing to see that we’ve had this very long, lasting relationship,” she said.
Dr. Witt Dillon’s research has been published in “Late Pleistocene onset of mutualistic human/canid (Canis spp.) relationships in subarctic Alaska.”
Read more and watch the video in the Clemson News article.
