title: Dogs as biological markers of past human behavior
title: the effect of human culture on Indigenous and European dog populations of North America
titleType: Subtitle
Creators: name: Thomas, Ariane E
Publisher: name: University of Iowa
Year: 2024
Subjects: ancient DNA
body size
dogs
Jamestown Colony
mitochondrial DNA
Biology

description: The domestication of dogs has been recognized as a pivotal marker of the human behavioral shift from hunters and foragers to maintaining and, later, controlling the reproductive biology of plants and animals. Dogs were the first mammals to enter into a commensal relationship with humans tens of thousands of years before agriculture and predate the next domesticated mammal by millennia. Additionally, dogs formed multifaceted and dynamic relationships with humans and ingrained themselves into human societies around the globe because of their biological and behavioral versatility allowed dogs to conform to the needs of their humans. In fact, the human-dog relationship is often characterized as the continuous process of morphological, genetic, and behavioral changes to dogs and their progenitors that resulted from their close coexistence with humans. Because of their strong connection throughout time, scholars have posited dog biology can be leveraged to study humans of the past when human-produced data is unavailable because events that affected humans also impacted their dogs.
description: I expand on this line of reasoning and propose that the phenotypic changes resulting from dog domestication harbor information about past human behaviors. Dog domestication is a complex process of genetic and behavioral phenotypic changes resulting from, at least in part, human activities and that dog biology can be reversed engineered to study the human behaviors that influenced dog traits. However, studies on archaeological dogs that emphasize biological methods, such as DNA and osteometric analyses, often neglect influential factors that affect human-dog interactions, particularly the impact of human culture, in the study design. My dissertation aims to address Aim 1) the theoretical and practical gaps in using archaeological dogs and wolves to gain insight into past human behavior using cultural affiliation and apply this to two case studies using Aim 2) ancient DNA and Aim 3) osteometry from North America.
description: Aim 1, described in Chapter 2, of this dissertation, is a review of the ways the study of dogs has redefined and questioned our conceptualizations of past human behavior. The first part addressed whether dogs are a suitable proxy for supplementing our understanding of human behaviors associated with domestication, past human movements, human mortuary practices, artificial selection, and early intensified human ecology. The second part reviewed what is known about the human-dog relationship from archaeological and genetic data and how those inferences have been made. The use of dogs is a promising approach to the study of human history, however, there are major challenges and limitations in using dogs to make inferences about the past. Continued advancements in theoretical interpretations of data from dogs are necessary to produce robust and accurate information about human behavior.
description: The second Aim detailed in Chapter 3 and 4, I explored interactions between Indigenous and European powers at Jamestown Colony, Viriginia, and other colonial sites in North America through the genetic ancestry of their dogs. Six ancient mitochondrial lineages dated between AD 1609 and 1617 showed that the Jamestown dogs have maternal lineages most closely associated with those of ancient Indigenous dogs of North America and cluster with ancient dogs from Late Woodland, Hopewell, and Virginia Algonquian archaeological sites. The high frequency of Indigenous dog lineages at Jamestown, but few of these lineages at other colonial sites suggests a complex social history of dogs at the interface of Indigenous and European populations during European colonization.
description: The final aim, Aim 3 in Chapter 5, investigated the impact of human management practices on dogs of the Great Plains using osteometric data. The North American Great Plains is well-known for its large-sized dogs attributed to their roles as haulers. Despite the ethnographic evidence on the breeding practices of Indigenous Plains societies, it is unclear the extent to x which human cultural affiliation affected the biology of Plains dog populations. This chapter assessed the impact of geographic, temporal, and human cultural affiliation variables on dog mandibular morphology, a known proxy for overall dog body size. The sample consisted of individual dogs from archaeological sites with known cultural associations that are well-accepted within the field of archaeology. The results indicated that multiple dog body sizes existed in Great Plains, but untested environmental variables and large date ranges confound the effect of human affiliation on dog populations for Čariks i Čariks and Oneota groups. However, it is possible that some cultural distinctions exist and need to be investigated further.
description: This research established a foundation for dog studies that seek to investigate past human behaviors, and to design thoughtful studies that incorporate human culture. The results of this dissertation have revealed that there are many gaps in our knowledge about the ecological factors that drive variation in dog biology in the past and present and that human-dog relationships are multifaceted, and dependent on temporal and cultural contexts. This dissertation addresses a few of those gaps including the usefulness of dog data to study human behaviors of the past and greater resolution into past human-dog relationships can be achieved when human cultures are considered. From this dissertation, it is possible that humans, when faced with stresses and significant adversity, do not prioritize the management of dogs and while human intention is capable of incredible feats, it was diminished at Jamestown and in the Great Plains, especially post-1750s AD. Overall, the lack of human involvement has biological consequences for Great Plains and Jamestown dogs within the last 500 years, which can be added to the collective suite of human behaviors towards dogs that can be used to support existing theories about dog domestication or generate new ones.