Yamana natives "Fuegian Dog" - Tierra del Fuego (update)

The Anuario Hidrográfico de la Marina de Chile, Vol 6, page 50, published in 1880, reports different expeditions sent by the Chilean Navy to map and explore their coastline, including southern Patagonia.

One of the reports mentions the Fuegian dog, the dog of the canoe people. Which may either be Yaghans (Yamana) or Alakaluf (Kaweskar) natives.

The text is the following (bold font mine):

"A species of Canis familiaris accompanies the Fuegian indians on all of their excursions along the channels, it breeds in the wild in Tierra del Fuego. It is a small animal, but very fierce and it is very useful for the Fuegian, and for this reason they appreciate it a lot; it seems to be the outcome of a crossbreding of the Canis familiaris with the Canis magellanicus due to its similarity with the latter".

This same account was given by the Chilean governor in Punta Arenas, on the Strait of Magellan in his Tierra del Fuego and its Native Peoples memoir of the Governor of Magallanes, Manuel Señoret, 1896 (in Spanish). Who wrote:

"The Fuegian dog is abundant and an aid to the indians, its origin seems to be a mixture of dog and fox, and is an interesting scientific problem not yet solved.".

Canis magellanicus (photo by Brian Ralphs) is one of Patagonia's foxes, now it is known as "Lycopex culpaeus magellanicus", it is a subspecies of the culpeo fox.

Its body is about 80 cm long, with a tail 44 cm long. Height 42 cm and weight around 7.5 to 8.5 kg.

This dog, of the canoe people should not be mistaken for the other native (?) dogs of southern Patagonia. Apparently there were different dogs in Pre-Hispanic Patagonia:

1. A large wolf-lik dog, used by Tehuelches, Aonikenk and Selknam people.
2. A smaller one, the fox-like Fuegian canoe people's dog.
3. And yet another one, small, with long curly hair of the extinct Chono canoe people of the Chilean fjords.

This is a photograph of a Yaghan dog ( image from page 332 of "Arkiv för zoologi" (1918-1920)

Text Appearing Before Image: "ETNAU LÖNNBERG, SOME SOUTH AMERICAN CANID. 13 is triangular, and in Ps. lycoides somewhat pentagonal, although perhaps less so than in most other South American Canidce. The dentition is different throughout. The Yaghan dog has comparatively larger incisors; its canines are shorter and stouter than in Ps. lycoides and rnagellanicus. In the Yaghan dog p^ is provided with a small posterior cusp and in p^ such a one is still better developed, while such cusps appear to be missing in the Ps. magellanicus-gTou-p. The difference..."

Text Appearing After Image: "Fig. 3. Skull of the Yaghan dog seen from the side. in shape of the upper carnassial {p^) is very important, as it seems. Its heel is much better developed in the Yaghan dog, and it is directed inwards in such a way that it forms a right angle against the longitudinal axis of the tooth itself. The inner end of the heel comes thus rather far behind the transversal line connecting the anterior ends of p^ of both sides. The shape of m^ is also different as in the Yaghan dog its longitudinal diameter is 78, i % of its transverse diameter, while in Ps. lycoides the same percentage is a little more than 68, and in Ps. magellanicus about 65 as far as my material admits any judgment. These relative dimensions of m^ of the Yaghan dog agree thus much better with the corresponding ones of Canis aureus viz. 74,4—80%,"

More posts will follow...

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2019 by Austin Whittall © 

Fuegian Dogs, some photos

Almost ten years ago (Oct. 2009) I posted about the Fuegian dogs -pictured below, said to descend from foxes. At that time I had only managed to get one photo of them, a stuffed specimen at a museum in Punta Arenas Chile. Today I have found several images of Fuegian dogs, which don't look fox like at all!

The photo from my 2009 post:

I have wondered if they were replaced by European dogs after these were introduced by shepherds, and the Selknam adopted the newcomers to replace their extinct breed.

A paper published a year ago in Science (The evolutionary history of dogs in the Americas, Maire Ni Leathlobhair, Angela R. Perri et al., Science 06 Jul 2018:Vol. 361, Issue 6397, pp. 81-85 DOI: 10.1126/science.aao4776) tells us that the Amerindian dogs were wiped out by disease brought to the New World after European discovery and conquest (post 1492 AD). The paper also came up with an intriguing discovery "The closest detectable extant lineage to precontact American dogs is the canine transmissible venereal tumor, a contagious cancer clone derived from an individual dog that lived up to 8000 years ago", but that will be discussed in a separate post.

Below are some of the photos I came across today in the Internet, they are all Selknam dogs. There were other natives in Tierra del Fuego, and their dogs are not depicted here (the Alakaluf, the Haush, the Yaghans or Yamana).

Selknam dogs with surviving Selknam people ca. 1910. (source)

Selknam woman, child and dog:

Selknam hunting with two dogs, and using bows and arrows.

Salesian father Juan Vila, with an embalmed Fuegian dog. Seems very much like the one in the Punta Arenas museum.

Here the Selknam are called "Ona", another name used until recently to designate these people.

Another dog, during a Selknam ritual.

Two dogs.

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2019 by Austin Whittall © 

More on the Fuegian "dog" (actually a fox)

Following a recent paper that more or less says that American dogs were wiped out when Europeans arrived post-1492 AD, I came across this paper on the Fuegian Dog, which ratifies what I posted (Fuegian Dog: that they were domesticated foxes!)

This paper Molecular identification of a Fuegian dog belonging to the Fagnano Regional Museum ethnographic collection Tierra del Fuego by Romina S.Petrigh, Martín H.Fugassa, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quaint.2013.07.030, Quaternary International, Volume 317, 13 December 2013, Pages 14-18, tells us the following:

"Abstract
Native-European contact in Tierra del Fuego was a rapid process, for which little ethnographic information has been produced. Although the Fuegian dog seemed to have been important to Selk'nam people's life, the taxonomic status of this extinct animal is still uncertain. The aim of the present work was to determine the zoological identity of a taxidermized canid belonging to a Fagnano Regional Museum collection, Río Grande, Tierra del Fuego. For this purpose, DNA from Fuegian dog and patagonian wild canids (Lycalopex culpaeus, Lycalopex griseus and Lycalopex gymnocercus) hairs was extracted. An mtDNA Region Control fragment was amplified by PCR and sequenced. Sequence alignment was performed among the sequences that were obtained in this research and the Canis lupus familiaris sequence from GenBank. Pairwise analysis showed a higher identity between the Fuegian dog and the culpeo fox (97.57%), with greater divergence with the current domestic dog (88.93%). These results were supported by the molecular phylogenetic analysis, suggesting atypical fox domestication by hunter-gatherers."

Above is the tree from the cited paper

This is another reference on Fuegian dogs (The Natural History of Dogs: Canidae Or Genus Canis of Authors ; Including Also the Genera Hyaena and Proteles, Volume 2) from 1840, by Charles Hamilton Smith.

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2018 by Austin Whittall ©