Abstract
Among Indigenous populations of the Arctic, domestic dogs (Canislupus familiaris) were social actors aiding in traction and subsistence activities. Less commonly, dogs fulfilled a fur-bearing role in both the North American and Siberian Arctic. Examples of garments featuring dog skins were collected during the 19th-20th centuries and are now curated by the National Museum of Denmark. We sequenced the mitochondrial genomes of macroscopically identified dog skin garments. We conducted stable carbon and nitrogen isotope ratio analysis of the dog furs and of fur samples from contemporaneous pelts of Arctic (C. lupus arctos) and grey (C. lupus) wolves. Despite the presence of biocides used to protect the fur clothing during storage, we extracted well-preserved DNA using a minimally-invasive sampling protocol. Unexpectedly, the mtDNA genomes of one-third of the samples were consistent with wild taxa, rather than domestic dogs. The strong marine component in the diets of North American dogs distinguished them from Greenland and Canadian wolves, but Siberian dogs consumed diets that were isotopically similar to wild species. We found that dog provisioning practices were variable across the Siberian and North American Arctic, but in all cases, involved considerable human labor.
Highlights
Biomolecular approaches to the zooarchaeology of dogs, including stable isotope analysis and ancient DNA, can speak to canine population histories and human-canid relationships over the course of our shared history
We conducted δ13C and δ15N analysis on the skeletal remains of dogs from north, central and south coast sites to determine, 1) Was there geographic variation in the types of foods fed to dogs? and, 2) How did the diets of dogs at Double Mer Point compare to archaeological and zooarchaeological evidence for human subsistence activities at the site? To facilitate our interpretation of dog diets, we developed the first archaeological isotope baseline for Labrador using the skeletal remains of wild animals collected from Inuit and Basque sites
The collagen samples were prepared at four laboratories: The Memorial Applied Archaeological Science lab (MAAS) of Memorial University (MUN), the Archaeological Research Laboratory of Stockholm University (SU), BioArCh of the University of York, and at the Department of Anthropology of the University of British Columbia (UBC)
Summary
Biomolecular approaches to the zooarchaeology of dogs, including stable isotope analysis and ancient DNA (aDNA), can speak to canine population histories and human-canid relationships over the course of our shared history. Alaskan communities of the pre-contact and modern eras provisioned dogs with salmon, a resource that could be acquired in bulk and dried (Loftus et al, 2014; McManus-Fry et al, 2018). Human-canine relationships and the position of dogs among communities of the western and central Arctic have been further examined using osteometric, archaeological, ethnographic and genetic data (Brown et al, 2013; Coltrain et al, 2004; Davydov and Klokov, 2018; Hill, 2018; Losey et al, 2018; Morrison, 1984; Park, 1987; Pitulko and Kasparov, 2017; Strecker, 2018) but to date similar research in the Eastern Arctic and Subarctic is limited in scope (Ameen et al, 2019; Woollett, 2003). Dog diets may reflect the geographic and seasonal distribution of prey resources, and the need to provision dogs with foods that could be stored and transported, or acquired while on the move
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