Dogs are likely to have accompanied humans to the Americas after the ice age.
Researchers have narrowed down the chronology of when the man’s best friend may have migrated to North America from a bone fragment of a 10,000-year-old dog found in southeast Alaska.
According to a University of Buffalo press release, the femur fragment, smaller than a penny, was discovered by surprise as scientists studied how climate change during the ice age affected survival and movements. of animals.
Researchers sequenced the DNA of a collection of hundreds of bones found in the region years ago when they realized that the small bone, originally thought to come from a bear, contained DNA from a dog that lived about 10,150 years ago, according to the statement.
“It all started with our interest in how ice age climate change affected the survival and movements of animals in this region,” said Charlotte Lindqvist, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Buffalo, lead author of the study in The Royal Society magazine, based in the United Kingdom. he said in a statement. “Southeast Alaska could have been a kind of ice-free stopping point, and now, with our dog, we believe that early human migration through the region could be much more important than some previously suspected.” .
Dogs were domesticated in Europe between 32,000 and 18,800 years ago. The findings suggest that dogs first migrated to the Americas about 16,000 years ago, according to the study.
The DNA in the bone suggests it came from a canine that strayed from a Siberian dog as early as 16,700 years ago, scientists determined. The timing of this division coincides with a period in which humans may have been migrating to North America by a coastal route that included southeast Alaska.
According to the study, there have been multiple waves of dogs migrating to the Americas. Arctic dogs came from East Asia with the Thule, ancestors of all modern Inuit peoples living in the Arctic. Siberian huskies were imported to Alaska during the gold rush and other European settlers brought other dogs.
But before, it was not clear the exact deadline for when the dogs ventured into the Americas. The discoveries of the bone coincide with the first arrival of humans in the Americas, after the last ice age, when coastal glaciers began to recede.
This suggests that “the dogs accompanied the first humans to enter the New World,” according to the study.
“The history of dogs has been intertwined, since ancient times, with that of humans who domesticated them,” the statement said.
However, the fossil record of ancient dogs in the Americas is still incomplete, so new remains to be discovered will provide important clues, said Flavio Augusto da Silva Coelho, a biological science student at the University at Buffalo. .
Prior to the discovery, the first ancient dog bones found in the U.S. were found in the Midwest, Coelho said.