America’s first dogs

Researchers were sequencing DNA from a collection of hundreds of bones excavated years before in Southeast Alaska by researchers including Timothy Heaton, PhD, professor of earth sciences at the University of South Dakota when they discovered a dog bone. Charlotte Lindqvist, an evolutionary biologist from University at Buffalo, was studying how Ice Age climatic changes impacted animals’ survival and movements in Southeast Alaska.

Lindqvist originally thought that the bone was from a bear but quickly realized that it was a dog bone. This gave them evidence about early human migration through that area and possibly how dogs first arrived in America.

Researchers analyzed the dog’s mitochondrial genome and concluded that the animal belonged to a lineage of dogs whose evolutionary history diverged from that of Siberian dogs as early as 16,700 years ago.

This discovery showed the the dog had a marine diet and supports the hypothesis that the first dog and human migration occurred through the Northwest Pacific coastal route.

Journal Reference:

Flavio Augusto da Silva Coelho, Stephanie Gill, Crystal M. Tomlin, Timothy H. Heaton, Charlotte Lindqvist. An early dog from southeast Alaska supports a coastal route for the first dog migration into the Americas. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2021; 288 (1945): 20203103 DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2020.3103

Cite This Page:

University at Buffalo. “How did dogs get to the Americas? An ancient bone fragment holds clues.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 23 February 2021. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/02/210223192442.htm>.

Researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have proven that the first dogs that lived in the Americas were descended from Siberian dogs, not wolves. These dogs came with their human counterpart as they migrated over the land bridge linking Siberia with Alaska.

According to the researchers few if any modern dogs are related to these ancient dogs. It appears that the dogs died out after people from Europe came to the Americas.

They also discovered “. . . that the genomic signature of a transmissible cancer that afflicts dogs appears to be one of the last “living” remnants of the genetic heritage of dogs that populated the Americas prior to European contact.”

This latest research brings up the question of the heritage of the Carolina Dog which claims to be descended from the original dogs that were brought to North America across the Bering Strait. It would have been interesting if the researchers included this breed of dog in their study.

Carolina Dog – (internet free photo) These dogs come in a variety of colors but many are tan

A Blog by Susan Bulanda

Certified Animal Behavior Consultant

When did dogs come to America?

America’s first dogs