possibly the only survivor of a lost dog lineage is a venereal tumor
July 7, 2018 9:44 PM   Subscribe

As outlined in a comprehensive study published Thursday in Science, indigenous dogs migrated to North America at least 10,000 years ago, alongside their human companions—the ancestors of Native American peoples. When the European colonization of the Americas began in the 1400s, these original canines, or “PCDs” (precontact dogs) quickly vanished. [...] The genomic analysis of these dogs revealed that they descended from Siberian canine stock, not wild North American wolves, as previously speculated. Though they thrived on the continent, practically none of their DNA is present in modern North American dogs. “Although greater degrees of PCD ancestry may remain in American dogs that have not yet been sampled, our results suggest that European dogs almost completely replaced native American dog lineages...” The Mysterious Disappearance of North America's First Dogs
posted by not_the_water (38 comments total) 28 users marked this as a favorite
 
I predict the first clone throwback dog within ten years.
posted by bq at 10:03 PM on July 7, 2018


This book is a good read if you’d like to know more about early American dogs.
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 10:06 PM on July 7, 2018 [5 favorites]


What about the chihuahua, Mexican hairless and that Carolina dog? I'm confused. Does this go for South America too?
posted by bonobothegreat at 11:08 PM on July 7, 2018 [7 favorites]


I tried to look it up and I'm confused too. The Chihuahua existed in Central America at least 1,400 years before Euorpean explorers arrived. I'm having a hard time picturing a Chihuahua making it's way to Mexico from Siberia. But all domestic dogs are said to have originated in Asia, so I guess my imagination needs a tune-up. I also learned that European dogs had a "limited" influence on indigenous breed populations when introduced to Meso/South America.
posted by Brocktoon at 12:09 AM on July 8, 2018 [1 favorite]


The Mysterious Disappearance of North America's First Dogs
Maybe they didn't take well to being dressed up?
posted by rongorongo at 1:38 AM on July 8, 2018 [3 favorites]


bq: "I predict the first clone throwback dog within ten years."

First up: The Salish "wool" Dog.
posted by Mitheral at 2:05 AM on July 8, 2018 [7 favorites]


What about the chihuahua, Mexican hairless and that Carolina dog? I'm confused. Does this go for South America too?

The original paper (you have to jump through some seemingly purposefully obstructive hoops to join without taking out a subscription to Science), seems to say that chihuahuas are the only identifiable modern American breed that has clear pre-Columbian roots. At least that's what I make of it, although they're not particularly clear about it:
To further assess the contribution of PCDs to modern American dog populations, we also analyzed 590 additional modern dog mitogenomes, including those from 169 village and breed dogs that were sampled in North and South America (21). We identified two modern American dogs (a chihuahua and a mixed-breed dog from Nicaragua) that carried PCD mitochondrial haplotypes (fig. S5), consistent with a limited degree of PCD ancestry (<2%) in modern American dogs. We also identified three East Asian dogs that carried a PCD haplotype, possibly as a result of ancient population substructure or recent dog dispersal (fig. S5) (3). Although greater degrees of PCD ancestry may remain in American dogs that have not yet been sampled, our results suggest that European dogs almost completely replaced native American dog lineages. This near disappearance of PCDs likely resulted from the arrival of Europeans, which led to shifts in cultural preferences and the persecution of indigenous dogs (25). Introduced European dogs may also have brought infectious diseases to which PCDs were susceptible.
posted by howfar at 2:46 AM on July 8, 2018 [2 favorites]


I described this article in detail to my Carolina dog, who was sitting in her chair by the window, but she merely flicked an ear as if to say “check the mtDNA haplotype A184, monkey.”
posted by sonascope at 3:18 AM on July 8, 2018 [17 favorites]


I described this article in detail to my Carolina dog, who was sitting in her chair by the window, but she merely flicked an ear as if to say “check the mtDNA haplotype A184, monkey.”

Mine was too busy stalking moles, but I got the same vibe.

For the uninitiated, here is some information about the Carolina dog.

The thing about Carolina dogs is that it seems like very little is known for sure. What does seem to be the case is that there are definite breed characteristics that are repeated with some regularity. My girl Sunshine looks so much like some of those wikipedia photos that it seems pretty apparent to me. Genetic research on dogs who look just like that shows that they have some markers that are not present in European dog lines.

So this suggests that they are at least partly pre-Columbian in their lineage. To what degree is highly in question. The seeming-integrity of certain breed characteristics suggests, to me, that if they were wild, it wasn't for long. And if they were interbred with European stocks, then it would seem to have been done deliberately and systematically to create a substantial population of similar dogs.

The simplest explanation (to me) is that they are mostly of pre-Columbian in origin. I have a hard time believing that all of these characteristics come back to one recent pairing that just so happened to flourish.

Then again, my subjective experience suggests that they are a hell of a breed. A lot of people think that Sunshine is part German Shepherd, and she's certainly got that sabling in the tips of her ears, nose and tail, and those ears. Until my wife found photos online that she thought were from our dog, we thought she was a blend of Belgian Malinois and Rhodesian Ridgeback, maybe with a touch of Greyhound. So who really knows?

Whatever the truth, the whole story about the Bering land bridge and being the only wild American dog is great to tell the (many) people who ask me what she is. They are gorgeous creatures with excellent dispositions, and if you walk a Carolina dog, people will pull over to compliment her and ask questions.
posted by Edgewise at 5:09 AM on July 8, 2018 [6 favorites]


A friend of mine got a designer-breed Native American Indian Dog, with a great deal of eye-rolling. (She needed a large, intelligent dog and this one made sense for her needs, but she's... not convinced of the provenance.) Th breeders are varying degrees of bullshit artist trying to pass off a husky-german shepard cross as an accurate reproduction of the indigenous dog, mostly because they look vaguely wolflike. They look nothing like carolina dogs, which would at least be plausible.
posted by restless_nomad at 6:36 AM on July 8, 2018 [1 favorite]


It shouldn't surprise us that the same thing that happened to North American human genetic legacy also happened to North American dogs. As the article says:
"This study demonstrates that the history of humans is mirrored in our domestic animals”
It's even the same mechanisms; disease and what the article describes as "persecution" of dogs. For humans we call it genocide.
posted by Nelson at 8:51 AM on July 8, 2018 [3 favorites]


For another data point, our dog is very similar to a Carolina dog, but she was found semi-feral on a Navajo reservation in New Mexico. Our understanding was that there are pockets of more native dog populations still found in remote areas like that.

It certainly seems like "dingo" is pretty close to a default breed, though, so its possible that's just what you get when humans have been hands-off for a while.
posted by tau_ceti at 8:57 AM on July 8, 2018 [2 favorites]


My own Carolina dog (from Brisbin's own program, so as legit as you probably get) is not only the best dog ever but distinctly different in looks and personality from the California-mill-bred "Carolina Dog" she grew up with. Interestingly, the dogs I've met that look the most like her are other pariah breeds, like a 'wadi dog' from Saudi Arabia and the dogs that hung around in Guyana.
posted by The otter lady at 10:49 AM on July 8, 2018 [4 favorites]


Forgot to include a picture of my dog.
posted by tau_ceti at 10:55 AM on July 8, 2018 [7 favorites]


My impression was that Carolina dogs were just a feral/semi-feral population that had been reproductively isolated long enough to breed back to the basal dog look. So they could be from NA populations, but also could be early European ferals.
posted by tavella at 11:10 AM on July 8, 2018


What about the chihuahua, Mexican hairless and that Carolina dog? I'm confused. Does this go for South America too?

According to the article Máire Ní Leathlobhair, the first author wrote in The Conversation:
No direct descendants of pre-contact dogs have so far been confirmed in modern populations. Genetic traces of these dogs have largely vanished, even when we look at breeds still considered to be “native American” like Chihuahuas, Mexican hairless dogs, and South American village dogs. While unsampled pockets of American dogs might still remain, what we’ve found so far suggests that they have been extensively replaced by European breeds.
posted by tavegyl at 11:12 AM on July 8, 2018


I have what I call a "Native Canadian Survival Dog" -- which is just my term for the western Canadian rez dogs, which, if they aren't exactly a breed, are at least a race or population. Z. is pretty typical of these dogs, is often hand-waved as a 'german shepherd something something', but looks (like her relatives) to have a lot in common with dogs who have been left alone for a while, including the Carolina dog or certain street dogs like the Trinidadian potcake dog.

Reading the linked article, I'm very surprised by how little 'native' DNA exists (i.e., almost none) in North American populations. I assumed that they had simply interbred with the new European arrivals, rather than being more or less completely replaced.
posted by bumpkin at 11:33 AM on July 8, 2018 [3 favorites]


"Potcake dog" is just such a great name.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 12:10 PM on July 8, 2018 [3 favorites]


Wikipedia has an article “Fuegian dog” which it claims were domesticated culpeos, South American foxes, which supposedly existed in Tierra del Fuego until the beginning of the 20th century.
posted by XMLicious at 1:21 PM on July 8, 2018


They're good dogs, mefi...
posted by Windopaene at 2:17 PM on July 8, 2018 [1 favorite]


This is tragic.

Carolina Dogs look so much like Dingos it makes me wonder whether there isn't more of a story there.

According to the Wikipedia Dingo article linked above, the two distinct Dingo lineages of Australia split from New Guinea Singing Dogs 8300 YBP and 7800 YBP, and I recall reading somewhere recently that there is unexplained New Guinea ancestry among some Amazonia indigenous people, and since Australian Dingos are thought to have been brought over by people from New Guinea ~5000 YBP, I'm wondering whether some New Guineans made their way to the New World sometime after 8300 YBP, bringing their dogs with them, and those dogs are the actual PCD ancestors of Carolina Dogs, not the dogs that came 10000 YBP.
posted by jamjam at 3:00 PM on July 8, 2018


It certainly seems like "dingo" is pretty close to a default breed, though, so its possible that's just what you get when humans have been hands-off for a while.

I swear I heard something on a nature documentary to that effect, that if you have a bunch of stray dogs that interbreed for a few generations that this is indeed what you get.

I went looking for something on this and found a bit on pariah dogs, which is sort of the global term (they discuss Carolina dogs as a kind of pariah dog in there - but look at the pictures of the different "pariah dogs" worldwide and they all look reaaaaally similar).
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 3:06 PM on July 8, 2018 [2 favorites]


The similar appearance of these dogs is much more likely to be the result of convergent evolution rather than an alternate ancestral lineage. While it's always possible that these researchers could have made mistakes, it seems very unlikely that the would have missed something New Guinea dog DNA showing up in their samples. Breeds are very highly inbred, and just a few generations of outbreeding eliminates most the physical characteristics of specialized breeds.
posted by haiku warrior at 3:37 PM on July 8, 2018


They weren't looking for New Guinea dog or Dingo DNA as far as I know, they were looking for the DNA of dogs that came to the New World around 10,000 years ago, so a question of "missing" what they weren't looking for in the first place would be irrelevant.
posted by jamjam at 4:31 PM on July 8, 2018


I'm surprised by the map in Fig 2., which shows several points in Peru, the one place I'd have naively guessed you'd be most likely to find the most PCD heritage. They only give it two sentences at the end of the paper, but say they tested "138 village dogs from South America and multiple 'native' breeds (e.g., hairless dogs and Catahoulas)".

The "and" is a bit confusing here, and a quick glance at the supplemental data suggests figuring out what each dot actually means will take a lot more effort than I'm willing to spend. But, if it's true Peruvian hairless dogs are almost entirely unrelated to PCDs, that's really weird. Is it a case of selective breeding for traits in new dogs that happen to be similar to old dogs? Or, is our idea of what a pre-Columbian Peruvian dog was like wrong?
posted by eotvos at 5:08 PM on July 8, 2018


My own Carolina dog (from Brisbin's own program, so as legit as you probably get) is not only the best dog ever but distinctly different in looks and personality from the California-mill-bred "Carolina Dog" she grew up with. Interestingly, the dogs I've met that look the most like her are other pariah breeds, like a 'wadi dog' from Saudi Arabia and the dogs that hung around in Guyana.

Very curious! My wife is from Guyana, so I'll have to ask her about this. I wonder if the 'wadi dog' is related to the Canaan dog (see below).

Carolina Dogs look so much like Dingos it makes me wonder whether there isn't more of a story there.

You're not the first person to speculate about this, but I have heard that the genetics suggest they are not closely related. There are actually a surprising number of breeds from around the world with a similar look.

Check out the New Guinea Singing Dog. The Indian pariah dog is not dissimilar.

Or how about the Canaan dog? They are also sighthounds and pariah dogs, but they are from the Middle East. Uncanny, no?

I was talking with some grad students in evolutionary biology, and they told me they had a colleague whose studies suggested that the domestication of dogs may have happened several times in prehistory.

Since dogs are the first domesticated animals and used in so many capacities, there's probably a lot we can learn (or at least confirm) about human migratory routes based on dog breeds. My own crackpot theory is that the Carolina dog could have spread to the Americas through Polynesian settlers in South America. But even I don't give my speculation much weight.
posted by Edgewise at 6:24 PM on July 8, 2018 [1 favorite]


So the conclusion we're coming to is that they're less of a breed and more of a dog archetype. A barketype, if you will.
posted by tau_ceti at 6:40 PM on July 8, 2018 [8 favorites]


The similar appearance of these dogs is much more likely to be the result of convergent evolution rather than an alternate ancestral lineage.

Er, yes, I was responding to the comment "It certainly seems like "dingo" is pretty close to a default breed, though, so its possible that's just what you get when humans have been hands-off for a while."
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 3:16 AM on July 9, 2018


I may be misunderstanding this but I have a hard time imagining that the native peoples of Mexico were breeding European dogs to resemble their local breeds. There are a lot of dogs in pre contact Aztec pottery in display at the Gardiner museum in Toronto that look exactly like the yappy little Mexican hairless named Michael that lived around the corner from me. The only difference was that Michael wore a little neoprene Superman suit.
posted by bonobothegreat at 4:28 AM on July 9, 2018 [2 favorites]


tau_ceti, I also have a dog found straying on a reservation in NM as a pup. She was lured into a car with a piece of pizza by my husband’s ex-girlfriend, for which I’m eternally grateful because she’s the best dog I’ve ever met. I suspect she’s some Southwestern offshoot of Carolina dog mixed with yellow lab. pic
posted by permiechickie at 6:41 AM on July 9, 2018 [1 favorite]


Coast Salish Wool Dogs were sheared like sheep, and the wool used to make blankets and clothing. I recently learned about them from my local tribal museum in the Pacific Northwest.

It’s kind of tragically sad. They are gone because it is expensive to keep carnivores as textile animals. You have to keep catching and feeding them fish, instead of letting them just eat grass.
So when settlers showed up with super super cheap blankets, nobody needed them anymore.

“Wool dogs lived in the house with their owners and were given special care and a different diet from the hunting breed. “
“Dogs were named, highly valued and often buried wrapped in a blanket. “
(Quotes from the Wool dog article at HistoryLink.org)
posted by LEGO Damashii at 9:57 AM on July 9, 2018 [2 favorites]


Here's a couple pics of a very good (Carolina) dog:

Sunshine contemplates the suburbs
Sunshine takes a break from making the world smile
posted by Edgewise at 2:40 PM on July 9, 2018 [1 favorite]


So the conclusion we're coming to is that they're less of a breed and more of a dog archetype. A barketype, if you will

I would prefur not to
posted by Dokterrock at 11:57 PM on July 9, 2018


I think the so-called pariah breeds are what you get when dogs, who have been hard at work for thirty thousand years on a meticulous program of guiding human breeding meant to produce in us the innate ability to go insane with joy whenever someone we love comes through the door, finally get out from under the atavistic Victorian canine eugenics project that turned dogs into fancy lifestyle furniture.
posted by sonascope at 9:26 AM on July 10, 2018


It's striking and very strange that the only DNA the Bering landbridge PCDs managed to pass along is in a transmissible tumor since European dogs must have had considerable amounts of sex with PCD dogs to catch the tumor in the first place (more than enough for quite a few puppies, I'd think), so I've been trying to think of a way the transmissible tumor itself could have prevented those dogs from having any surviving progeny.

The tumor isn't often fatal to modern dogs apparently because their immune systems learn to recognize it and cause it to go into remission, but evidently not before it has a chance to be passed on in enough cases that it's still circulating around.

But since the tumor has DNA unique to the PCDs, it probably has antigens unique to them as well, and that would mean a European dog's immune system, unlike a PCD dog's immune system, could mount an attack against the tumor that did not involve collateral damage to heathy tissues, because none of the European dog's healthy tissues would display the antigens unique to the PCDs.

But once a European dog was immune to the tumor, it would also have an immediate immune response to tissues of PCD dogs which bore the tumor antigens, and if one of those tissues happened to be sperm cells of PCD dogs, that could turn out to be a very effective way of blocking a European female from being impregnated by a PCD male.

On the other hand, if the seminal fluid of a European male immunized against the tumor contained antibodies to the unique antigens of the tumor, or immune system cells sensitized to those antigens, then it seems possible that those antibodies and immune cells could cause enough inflammation in the reproductive tracts of PCD females to block pregnancy in that case, too.

If something like this is true, I'd imagine there were hybrids at first, but as immunity against the tumor spread among strictly European dogs, hybrids could have had a harder and harder time reproducing.
posted by jamjam at 2:16 PM on July 10, 2018 [1 favorite]


It's still kind of weird, though, that there'd be *zero* genetic inheritance in the surviving dog breeds, notably the mexican hairless/Xoloitzcuintli. It's easy to see how major chunks of european genetics would get in, european dogs breed with Xolo dogs, the puppies that looked/acted most Xolo get bred on further, even if they could be primarily european genetically. But I'd expect at least some existing genetics to get passed down.
posted by tavella at 2:25 PM on July 10, 2018


That's why I said Bering landbridge PCDs rather than just PCDs: I'd bet there are other PCD dogs that did leave progeny, they just didn't come over the bridge -- or have the tumor.

In addition to unexplained preColumbian New Guinea ancestry among human beings in South America, there's Ainu and a bunch of other Asian ancestry on the Peruvian coast which probably arrived by boats which may had room for a few dogs.
posted by jamjam at 2:42 PM on July 10, 2018


So there is some class of dogs whose DNA (except for the communicable tumor) is not represented in the current population of Noth American dogs.

Given that there are dog breeds that existed in North America pre contact and continue to exist, is
PCD (pre contact dog) just a poorly chosen name for the category of dogs whose DNA they are making claims about, or are we to imagine that breeds like Xoloitzcuintli were continuously recognized as being the same breed (sort of dog) all the while their ancestral DNA was being completely replaced by the DNA of European dogs?
posted by thedward at 6:42 PM on July 11, 2018 [1 favorite]


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