An interesting article on the arrival and dispersal of dogs in America. It was published last June and has some interesting points regarding the dating of their introduction into the New World. (Aurélie Manin, et al., (2025). Ancient dog mitogenomes support the dual dispersal of dogs and agriculture into South America. Proceedings of the Royal Society, June 18 2025. Volume 292 Issue 2049 https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2024.2443)
I will quote the main points:
Dogs (Canis familiaris) accompanied early waves of people who entered North America at least 15 000−16 000 years before present (BP)... Ancient DNA analyses have shown that all dogs preceding contact with European settlers (hereafter referred to as pre-contact dogs) possessed mitochondrial haplotypes belonging to the mitochondrial A2b clade that is specific to the Americas...
Dogs belonging to the A2b clade spread throughout the Americas, except in the Amazon basin where linguistic data suggest that they were unknown until the Europeans arrived, during the sixteenth century...
The earliest commonly accepted dog remains in Mexico, Ecuador and Peru are dated to 5200−5000 BP...
the reasons for their delayed dispersal in the region remain contentious...
The indigenous American A2b mitochondrial clade, and its associated nuclear ancestry, has now almost vanished from the continent. Pre-contact maternal lineages have only been found in two modern American dogs so far: a village dog from Nicaragua and a Chihuahua from the United States...
Evidence from nuclear DNA indicates that the proportion of Native American ancestry in modern American dogs (such as the Chihuahua and the Xoloitzcuintli) is approximately 3–4% at most
It makes me wonder if there was a large variety of Native dogs and all but the A2b haplogroup was the only survivor.
Did the American dogs suffer from death due to diseases brought to America by the European dogs? Did they die out in droves like the Amerindians did when confronted with new diseases?
Perhaps there were other lineages, vanished and ignored because we have not yet found remains of these dogs?
The authors of this study acknowledge that "To date, archaeogenomic studies of American dogs have largely focussed on North America while ancient Central and South American dogs are poorly represented." So they analyzed canine remains across this region and 42 newly mitochondrial genomes, all of which are part of the A2 lineage. It should be noted that they excluded some dogs belonging to B, C, D, haplogroups assigning them to post-contact dogs.
The authors suggest that maize agriculture spread into South America with dogs: "[evidence supports that ] movement of people and dogs in association with the spread of agriculture rather than supporting the hypothesis that dogs were introduced during the initial peopling of South America by hunter–gatherers. This dispersal happened in a context of early agrarian societies" some 7,000 years BP.
Meaning that dogs and farming went together into South America. There were no dogs there before 7,000 BP
Does this mean that the original Paleoindians living in South America since at least 15,000 BP did so without dogs? They didn't hunt with them, or share their company?
The paper addresses these concerns as follows:
"This long delay is surprising, as human populations were already present in South America for at least 8000 years prior to the arrival of dogs and different hypotheses can be proposed. The earliest fisher–hunter–gatherers that inhabited central America and reached South America may have not found many subsistence advantages from keeping dogs. Moreover, crossing the Central American land bridge required the dogs to adapt to a tropical environment characterized by many new diseases, insects and parasites, and they may have been easy prey for local predators...
Under this scenario, only few dogs may have reached South America during its initial peopling, albeit it is important to note that, to date, no dog remains have been confidently identified in these early settlements. According to the data produced in this paper, this (still hypothetical) early population would have been replaced by the later arrival of dogs accompanying the development of agrarian societies"
It should be noted that both the Chono and the Fuegian boat people had dogs when encountered by Europeans in the 1500s. So dogs did provide subsistance advantages, at least to these natives. These dogs have not been dated, but, they may have reached this region later, after the wave that this paper argues brought dogs into South America 7,000 years ago.
Patagonian Dogs
As I mention in my book's second edition, the first evidence of pre-Hispanic dogs in Patagonia comes from two sites: Angostura site, in Rio Negro Province, on the river of the same name, and in Lihuel Calel, La Pampa, dated to around 1,080 AD. We do know that all Patagonian and Fuegian peoples had “dogs” before 1,080 AD, but they were not necessarily of the modern domestic dog variety (Canis lupus familiaris) derived from wolves. The South American Culpeo and Dusicyon avus fox-like canids were domesticated in lieu of wolves. The remains of the prehistoric dog Canis (Dusicyon avus) have been found across southern Patagonia in Paleo-Indian sites. Avus was a big and wolf-like animal that shared several features with the Falkland Islands (Malvinas) warrah wolf-fox.
Dusicyon avus was the only carnivore that became extinct after the late Pleistocene extinction 2 million years ago, and it died out before the arrival of the Spaniards to America. Why?
It was a large foxlike animal like the culpeo fox (Lycalopex culpaeus) but bigger (weighing around 15 kg – 33 lb.) Its habitat covered all of Patagonia, including the Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego, and north of it, the Pampas, and parts of the Cuyo region in Argentina.
In 2024, the remains of D. avus that were found in Cañada Seca, Mendoza, were dated to 1,500 years ago. They were buried beside humans. Isotopic analysis showed that it shared a human diet which was different from that of other foxes, suggesting it “could have been a companion, even a pet of the hunter-gatherers […] that lived there.” The study also found that Dusicyon avus didn’t disappear due to interbreeding with domestic dogs. D. avus was “the most commonly identified canid in Fuego-Patagonian archaeological sites until its extinction” around 400 years ago. Something else led to its demise, but what? We don't know.
Current consensus is that dogs were domesticated around 40,000 years ago (source). Could the first Amerindians have reached the New World Before this date? This could explain why they didn't bring dogs with them.
Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2025 by Austin Whittall ©
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