“Dog is man’s best friend” may be an ancient cliché, but when that friendship began is a longstanding question among scientists. A study led by a University of Arizona researcher is one step closer to an answer to how Indigenous people in the Americas interacted with early dogs and wolves.
“Dog is man’s best friend” may be an ancient cliché, but when that friendship began is a longstanding question among scientists. A study led by a University of Arizona researcher is one step closer to an answer to how Indigenous people in the Americas interacted with early dogs and wolves.
The study, published in the journal Science Advances and based on archaeological remains from Alaska, shows that people and the ancestors of today’s dogs began forming close relationships as early as 12,000 years ago—about 2,000 years earlier than previously recorded in the Americas.
“We now have evidence that canids and people had close relationships earlier than we knew they did in the Americas”, said lead study author François Lanoë, an assistant research professor in the U of A School of Anthropology in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences.
“People like me who are interested in the peopling of the Americas are very interested in knowing if those first Americans came with dogs”, Lanoë added. “Until you find those animals in archaeological sites, we can speculate about it, but it’s hard to prove one way or another. So, this is a significant contribution.”
Lanoë and his colleagues unearthed a tibia, or lower-leg bone, of an adult canine in 2018 at a longstanding archaeological site in Alaska called Swan Point, about 70 miles southeast of Fairbanks.
