Abstract
Domestic dogs have been central to life in the North American Arctic for millennia. The ancestors of the Inuit were the first to introduce the widespread usage of dog sledge transportation technology to the Americas, but whether the Inuit adopted local Palaeo-Inuit dogs or introduced a new dog population to the region remains unknown. To test these hypotheses, we generated mitochondrial DNA and geometric morphometric data of skull and dental elements from a total of 922 North American Arctic dogs and wolves spanning over 4500 years. Our analyses revealed that dogs from Inuit sites dating from 2000 BP possess morphological and genetic signatures that distinguish them from earlier Palaeo-Inuit dogs, and identified a novel mitochondrial clade in eastern Siberia and Alaska. The genetic legacy of these Inuit dogs survives today in modern Arctic sledge dogs despite phenotypic differences between archaeological and modern Arctic dogs. Together, our data reveal that Inuit dogs derive from a secondary pre-contact migration of dogs distinct from Palaeo-Inuit dogs, and probably aided the Inuit expansion across the North American Arctic beginning around 1000 BP.
Highlights
Dogs (Canis lupus familiaris) played a critical role in early human adaptation to circumpolar high-latitude environments
We found haplotypes immediately basal to this A2 subclade in Siberia dating to several thousand years prior to the Inuit colonization of the North American Arctic, suggesting that the appearance of these lineages on Palaeo-Inuit sites was the result of the Siberian ancestry of the dogs and people
The phenotypic and genetic data presented here suggest that a novel dog population that was morphologically divergent from, and genetically more diverse than earlier Palaeo-Inuit dogs, accompanied Inuit migrants into and across the North American Arctic
Summary
Dogs (Canis lupus familiaris) played a critical role in early human adaptation to circumpolar high-latitude environments. Two additional Alaskan samples (TRF.02.27, TRF.02.28) taken from clothing made of canid pelts held in ethnographic collections are likely made from wolf pelts on the basis of their mitochondrial genomes (electronic supplementary material, figure S4) indicating that the use of wolf pelts continued into at least the historical period despite easy access to dogs Both nineteenth century Arctic explorers and twentieth century anthropologists reported that Arctic groups often encouraged hybridization of their dogs with wolf populations in order to maintain and strengthen their lineages [41,42,43,44]. The absence of these haplotypes in modern dogs may reflect the lack of systematic sampling in the region to date, the low frequency or the disappearance of these haplotypes
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