For about twenty years, the bone fragment “PP-00128” in the Earth Science Collection of the University of North Alaska Museum was believed to have come from an ancient bear species. A small femoral fissure was dug between two fingers at a location on the southeast coast of Alaska, where archaeologists found the remains of thousands of years old fish, birds, mammals and humans.
But recent genetic research has had an effect that surprised scientists (but not dog owners): ‘PP-00128’ came from a four-legged friend who traveled with humans through the icy New Forest of the United States about 10,500 years ago.
An analysis of the ancient remains of a domestic dog found to date in the United States was published in the journal Yesterday Activities of the Royal Society b It not only provides new insights into the ways in which the first dogs came to the United States and the ways in which they followed the first Americans, but also confirms the very old and deep bond between man and domestic dog.
“Even if you can’t remember the lives of people who lived 10,000 years ago, you can still imagine what the relationship between humans and their dogs should be like,” he says. Carly Amin, A zoologist at the University of Exeter in Great Britain who is not involved in the new study.
Pav prints via USA
Although this is the earliest physical evidence for the existence of domestic dogs in the United States, the femoral cleft may not have come from one of the first dogs to move from Northeast Asia to the New World. In 2018, Cemeteries Many dogs in Illinois He saw those around him 9910 years old. With a difference of a few centuries, the honorable title of ‘early dog’ goes only to the Alaskan dog ‘PP-00128’. But archaeologists are increasingly concerned that two ancient sites, almost identical in size, have been found in very different places in North America. That means the dogs must have gone to America before. But when did the first dogs arrive in the New World?
According to Recently provided genetic traces The last glacial maximum (LGM) was 26,500 to 19,000 years ago when one-third of North America was covered by dense ice, with humans and wolves increasingly confronting wild wolves in Siberia. Relatively temperate zones Can find and eat prey. Some of these wolves must have evolved quite gradually into domestic dogs somewhere between 40,000 and 19,000 years ago.
Scientists are currently trying to gather genetic information from bones excavated in North America, including bones preserved in the University of North Alaska Museum. This research is part of a multidisciplinary project that looks at the development of animal species, climate and terrain in an area that was sometimes covered by improving snow masses during this era. Charlotte Lindquist, An evolutionary biologist at Buffalo University and co-author of a new study that explored the life of bears during this period. A bone specimen, named PP-00128, was first excavated at the site of the Lawyer’s Cave in the Blake Channel, due to bear species of the time.
Although genetic testing showed that PP-00128 did not belong to a bear, due to the small size of the bone fracture, the complete core DNA of the dog could not be isolated. But mitochondrial DNA – a part of the whole gene that can only be obtained through the female line – can be obtained. Diversity group analysis indicates that the dog belongs to a lineage that separated from Siberian relatives 16,700 years ago. First people May have entered North America via coastal areas.
But even that time may not have been the time when some Siberian dogs first came to the United States in the company of humans. Unless there are very few dogs living in the area, all of the remaining dog populations in Siberia are U.S. Says it is unlikely to descend from a single mother like the population Krishna Veerama, A demographic geneticist at Stony Brook University who is not involved in new research. Most likely, dogs from both groups came from one ancestor many generations ago and did not go their separate ways after a long time.
