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Remains of oldest American dog bolster idea that first humans arrived along the coast - Science Magazine
Feb 24, 2021 1 min, 49 secs

DNA analysis of this fingernail-size fragment of bone showed it once belonged to the oldest known dog in the Americas.

When researchers began to excavate a tunnellike cave on the west coast of Alaska in 1998, they were hoping to discover the remains of ancient bears.

Instead, they unearthed something even more intriguing: a tiny chip of bone belonging to the first known dog in the Americas.

The find supports the idea that dogs accompanied the first humans who set foot on these continents—and that both traveled there along the Pacific coast.

Researchers once thought humans initially entered the Americas about 12,000 years ago.

That’s when thick glaciers that covered much of North America began to melt.

This opened a corridor, which allowed people to trek from Siberia across now-submerged land in the Bering Sea, and then into North America on the hunt for mammoth and other big game.

But over the past decade, archaeologists have shown people might have begun to move into North America much earlier.

They traveled from Siberia through the Alaskan archipelago about 16,000 years ago, eventually making their way down the Pacific coast.

The bone is about 10,200 years old, making its owner the oldest dog known in the Americas, the scientists report today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

The pup’s genome revealed it was closely related to the first known dogs, which researchers think were domesticated in Siberia about 23,000 years ago.

That’s a clue that dogs—and their humans—left Siberia and entered the Americas thousands of years before North America’s glaciers melted.

“Here we have the genetic evidence, if not the physical evidence, [showing] dogs were already in the Americas with humans 16,000 years ago,” says Durham University archaeologist Angela Perri, who was not part of the team.

“Understanding how the dogs moved also shows you how the humans moved,” says Flavio Augusto da Silva Coelho, a graduate student at UB who did the DNA and other analyses.

The study shows dogs are a useful way to track ancient human migrations, especially when human remains are missing or can’t be sampled because of descendant community concerns, she says.

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