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Dogs came to the New World with people 14,000 or more years ago and for many thousands of those years, they were the only domesticated animals. They were beasts of burden, guardians of the living, guides for the dead, hunters, companions, the occasional entree, and healers. The Hare Indian dog was maintained on its own island in the Pacific Northwest for its hair, with which its people made cloth until English traders came with machine-made Hudson’s Bay Company wool blankets.
When zoologist Glover Morrill Allen set out to catalog the dogs of Native Americans in the opening decades of the last century, he cautioned that except for some remote Arctic dogs, they most likely were not to be found in pure form if they were to be found alive at all. The aboriginal dogs had succumbed to slaughter, disease, and interbreeding with dogs brought to the Americas from Asia and Europe following first contact. Even the far north was not remote enough to be safe. The gold rushes of the late 19th and early 20th centuries depended on thousands of dogs shipped from the lower forty-eight states to haul sleds and carry packs laden with supplies and gold. Those dogs that survived bred into the indigenous gene pool
At the time Allen was conducting his research, the legendary Tahltan bear dog was going extinct. Hunters carried the small dogs in baskets to where their larger dogs had brought a bear to bay and then freed them to harry the bear to distraction while the hunters moved in for the kill. The little dog’s fate was more common than not, yet over the years, some dogs were said by one human group or another to be direct descendants of specific Aboriginal landraces, like the Chihuahua or xoloitzcuintli, the Mexican hairless dogs that had counterparts as far south as Peru. Other dogs were said to carry traces of an ancestral cross of Aboriginal dogs, early settlers’ dogs, and the occasional wolf, like the Catahoula leopard dog, St. Johns water dog, and other curs and feists. The Navajo Reservation was believed to have Aboriginal dogs among its hoards of dogs. But finding hard evidence to add substance to legends and conjecture has proved difficult.
Navajo sheep guarding dogs vie for a cantaloupe.
In the 2011 issue of BMC Evolutionary Biology, a team of geneticists from Uppsala University in Goteborg, Sweden, published results of the most comprehensive genetic survey to date of American street dogs. They found that non-purebred dogs in America formed a large reservoir of genetic diversity but any contribution from Aboriginal dogs to that diverse gene pool was so slight as to be nearly undetectable. That was in keeping with what other researchers had found.
Now, Peter Savolainen, a geneticist specializing in dogs at the Sweden’s KTH-Royal Institute of Technology, argues in the July 10, 2013 issue of Proceedings of the Royal Society—B that more than traces remain of the Aboriginal dogs of the New World.
Savolainen and his team argue that a number of Arctic dogs show no sign of mixing with European dogs and must be genetically much as their forebears were when they arrived in the New World several thousand years ago. The researchers identify those dogs as Inuit, Canadian Eskimo, and Greenland dogs. The geneticists said the Alaskan Malamute would have been included had they not found evidence that it had mixed with Siberian huskies since its arrival in the New World. Since arguably the Malamute, at least initially, was an overgrown Siberian husky, this might be a case of creating a distinction without a difference.
Savolainen and his colleagues widened their search by comparing the mitochondrial DNA from living dogs with that of dogs from pre-Columbian Americas, East Asia, and Europe. They found evidence that the Chihuahua lineage reaches back to pre-Columbian America. They also assigned the xolo and its hairless Peruvian counterpart to the status of indigenous breeds that have remained relatively free of crossbreeding with other types of dogs and suggested that the Carolina dogs, presented as the free-ranging dingo of the Southeastern United States left to fend for itself after removal of the Indians from that region in the 1830s in what came to be known as the Trail of Tears, might have East Asian origins.
The Carolina dog was created from prick-eared, medium-sized dogs I. Lehr Brisbin, Jr., captured from the Savannah River Nuclear Reservation on the border of Georgia and South Carolina. Whether the dog is ancient or a more modern admixture, including an infusion of Chow Chow or some other breed of Asian origin has yet to be shown. According to the Carolina dog’s website, there were seven founders, a small number but not uncommon in the world of purebred dogs. Still with so few founders, it would be interesting to know how many of the dogs sampled had the same mother?
Given persistent rumors that various of the native born curs and feists represent colonial-era mixing of Native American’s and settlers’ dogs, the pool of dogs sampled should be expanded. A number of people over the years have speculated about the heritage of dogs on some of the Indian Reservations, like the small sheep guarding dogs of the Navajo, and it would be interesting to examine the genetic make-up of those dogs as well.
For all the news Savolainen and his colleagues have generated with this study, it remains incomplete. Because it is inherited through the mother, mitochondrial DNA gives a partial, blurred snapshot of an animal’s genetic heritage. The same can be said for Y chromosome analysis with its paternal bias. Whole genome scans provide a more comprehensive view because they include the contributions of both parents. The level of detail the whole genome scans provide is so much greater and clearer that it can sometimes change how a dog is viewed.
It is nice to have confirmed that the first New World dogs came with their people from East Asia and to learn that some of our modern dogs—breeds and mongrels—carry at least some pre-Columbian genetic material. But for now, these studies lack historical context. They leap from a generalized pre-Columbian past to the present without any indication of how the animals got there. In emphasizing continuity between present and past as well as the original Asian connection, Savolainen overlooks admixing, which his study shows is the rule. More detail is needed all around to flesh out the rich and varied history of American dogs.
