A pair of jawbones pried from the earth beneath Virginia’s colonial Jamestown settlement may illuminate when America's first dogs vanished and the roles they may have played in the lives of both Native Americans and European colonists.
, replaced genetically by European breeds. Now, a pair of jawbones pried from the earth beneath Virginia’s colonial Jamestown settlement may illuminate when these dogs vanished and the roles they may have played in the lives of both Native Americans and European colonists.
How and when this dramatic genetic turnover happened remains unknown. So Ariane Thomas, a graduate student studying anthropology at the University of Iowa, turned to the remains of dogs uncovered at Jamestown between 2007 and 2010. Jamestown was the first permanent English settlement in the Americas, founded largely by explorers with little farming experience.
Curiously, the dogs aren’t closely related to canines dated to about 1000 to 1400 C.E. found at another early Virginian colonial village known as Weyanoke, just 50 kilometers away. “There’s a lot more diversity than maybe we initially thought,” Thomas says. That suggests European dogs may have replaced indigenous ones slowly, she says.
How exactly these indigenous dogs came to Jamestown remains a mystery, she says. Colonists wanted to maintain the prized lineages of European hunting dogs, so it’s unlikely they would have knowingly allowed native dogs to breed with their own, Thomas notes. Later, a law passed in 1629 expressly prohibited trading European dogs to Indigenous people.
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