Study reveals friendship between man and dog in the Americas began 12,000 years ago

The origin of dogs as companions to humans is a topic of ongoing debate. However, a recent archaeological find could shed light on when this partnership began in the Americas. A 12,000-year-old shin bone, belonging to a dog-like creature, was unearthed at Swan Point in Alaska's interior, indicating an early relationship between Indigenous peoples and canine species in the region.

While the shin bone could have belonged to a wolf, chemical analysis of the bone found that it didn’t eat like a wolf.

Instead of eating terrestrial prey, the creature thrived on a diet of salmon, most likely fed to it by humans.

The shin bone does not, however, resemble that of any modern-day dog, according to the archeologists who have published a report in the Science Advances journal.

“It’s not related to the dog populations that we know,” said François Lanoë, an anthropologist and archaeologist at the University of Arizona said in The Washington Post.

Photo: courtesy of Zach Smith

“Behaviorally, it probably behaved like a dog. Even if it was a wolf, it was a tamed wolf – you can think of it as a preliminary stage of domestication because it was most likely fed by people directly,” he added.

Dogs were the first animal to be domesticated by man with some experts arguing that this happened around 20,000 years ago somewhere in Eurasia.

The authors of the study state that while they can’t say for sure that their shin bone discovery belongs to what we consider a dog, the canid most certainly had a relationship with humans.

Though the study leaves a lot of questions unanswered, it does offer clues to the ancestry and diet of the forbearers of modern-day dogs.

And as far as canids in the Americas go, Audrey Lin, from the American Museum of Natural History points out in The Washington Post, “Indigenous peoples throughout North America highly value canids, and wolves often take a really huge part.”

“They feature prominently in origin stories, so any study that addresses this deep relationship between humans and wolves and the deep respect that they have for wolves is really cool,” she added.

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