A University of Arizona anthropology professor spends summers in the state known as the Last Frontier excavating archaeological sites alongside researchers from the University of Alaska.
A new study by the group says bonds between early dogs and humans in the Americas started a couple thousand years earlier than what was previously known.
The group in recent years dug up part of a tibia from an adult canine that testing shows lived about 12,000 years ago, when moose and bison were the diet of wolves.
“And we thought looking at their diet, doing chemical analysis of their bones, was a good way to investigate the relationship they had with people at the time,” said François Lanoë, a UA assistant research professor and lead author of the study.
A review of the leg bone, and a roughly 8,100-year old jawbone found later at another archaeological site, revealed that both canines regularly ate salmon given to them by humans.
“It's really interesting from an evolutionary standpoint, if you want, or a historical point to when it happened and how it happened,” Lanoë said.
But, he also notes, this doesn’t rule out humans and canines starting to bond even further back.
“It almost certainly did before, 15, 16, 17,000 years (ago),” Lanoë said.
-
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has agreed to determine if it will list the monarch butterfly on the endangered species list by June 2030. -
The architects of the Central Arizona Project said the canal system would run out of water without massive augmentation, but decades of CAP policymakers did not heed those warnings. -
Arizona had about 150 more wildfires this year than last, but with significantly less damage. Since wildfire season is now a year-round occurrence, experts caution vigilance. -
Hailey Nelson wants to go into space. But first, she completed an earth-bound mission as an analog astronaut. -
New satellite observations show that some global river models struggle to account for dams, reservoirs and other human influences, raising questions about their reliability for water planning.
