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.
Roughly 3000 years ago, nomadic pastoralists began to arrive in the Cis-Baikal region of eastern Siberia. While the archaeological record of these groups is quite extensive, most research on pastoralists here has focused on mortuary traditions while questions about subsistence practices have been left largely unaddressed. Few habitation sites from the late Holocene here contain stratified deposits, and virtually none have been subject to modern excavation methods or zooarchaeological analyses. We present new faunal data from the recently excavated Sagan-Zaba II site located on the west coast of Lake Baikal. This site offers a unique opportunity to examine diachronic patterns in diet and subsistence practices of local pastoralists. It contains stratified deposits associated with different periods of pastoralist occupation spanning much of the late Holocene. Significantly, it is the first site of this period in the region to be screened with fine-meshed sieves and to be systematically studied by zooarchaeologists. The results of our research reveal a series of new insights on pastoralist subsistence practices. First, the primary domesticates in all periods were sheep, goats, cattle, and horses. Cattle appear to increase through time at the site while horses remained relatively rare. Second, pastoralists at Sagan-Zaba regularly hunted Lake Baikal's freshwater seals, long after the introduction of domesticated livestock. Third, hunting of terrestrial mammals, particularly roe deer and red deer, was also common at the site. Finally, our data demonstrate that pastoralists here also regularly fished. This subsistence practice was previously unrecognized in the region, likely due to lack of sieving of sites. Furthermore, these data suggest that historically documented fishing by modern local pastoralists and increases in sedentism were not completely the result of Russian-period settlement of the region but instead were occurring in Cis-Baikal long prior to the modern era.
The first objective of this study is to examine temporal patterns in ancient dog burials in the Lake Baikal region of Eastern Siberia. The second objective is to determine if the practice of dog burial here can be correlated with patterns in human subsistence practices, in particular a reliance on terrestrial mammals. Direct radiocarbon dating of a suite of the region’s dog remains indicates that these animals were given burial only during periods in which human burials were common. Dog burials of any kind were most common during the Early Neolithic (∼7–8000 B.P.), and rare during all other time periods. Further, only foraging groups seem to have buried canids in this region, as pastoralist habitation sites and cemeteries generally lack dog interments, with the exception of sacrificed animals. Stable carbon and nitrogen isotope data indicate that dogs were only buried where and when human diets were relatively rich in aquatic foods, which here most likely included river and lake fish and Baikal seal (Phoca sibirica). Generally, human and dog diets appear to have been similar across the study subregions, and this is important for interpreting their radiocarbon dates, and comparing them to those obtained on the region’s human remains, both of which likely carry a freshwater old carbon bias. Slight offsets were observed in the isotope values of dogs and humans in our samples, particularly where both have diets rich in aquatic fauna. This may result from dietary differences between people and their dogs, perhaps due to consuming fish of different sizes, or even different tissues from the same aquatic fauna. This paper also provides a first glimpse of the DNA of ancient canids in Northeast Asia.
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