People said native dogs gone right away, Europeans come in with theirs and that’s it. Story sounded neat. Too neat.
But bones dug up at Jamestown, early 1600s, don’t agree. Researchers thought all European by then. Wrong. Six of those dogs still had Indigenous blood.
So they didn’t vanish. Not right away. They lived beside the imports. Maybe mixed, maybe not, nobody can say for sure now. Messy, complicated, not the clean swap in history books.
They held on till they couldn’t. Colony kept growing, pushing out old ways, people and their dogs both. Native lines faded, gone. What’s left now is bones in the dirt. But bones tell you enough. These dogs didn’t quit easy. They stayed as long as they could.
Unearthing the Past: DNA Analysis Reveals Surprising Ancestry
They went through 181 dog bones from Jamestown, at least 16 dogs in there. Thought it’d be the usual story, all European stock. But DNA told different. Six of those dogs showed Indigenous lines, straight North American ancestry still alive in the colony.
That flips the old idea on its head. We were told native dogs got wiped quick, replaced fast. Too simple. Not true.
What it really shows is messier. Dogs from here living beside the imports, maybe mixing, maybe not, but not gone right away. Coexistence, overlap, some fight to hold on. History didn’t clean swap them out like a light switch.
A Tale of Two Cultures: Dogs as Symbols of Identity
Both settlers and Native people cared for their dogs. Companions, workers, part of who they were. But same love also stirred trouble between them.
Colonists often wrote about Indigenous dogs as mongrels, mutts, saying they weren’t bred right, not even owned proper. Shows what they thought, more insult than fact.
On the other side, Native folks looked at European dogs as a threat. Not just strange animals but danger to their way. They tried to limit them, keep them from spreading, from taking hold.
From Companions to Cuisine: The Grim Reality of Colonial Life
Maybe the hardest part of this study—cut marks, burn marks, right on the dog bones. Shows some were butchered, eaten. Not just pets anymore, turned into food.
It lines up with what’s written about the Starving Time, winter 1609–1610. Colonists desperate, eating whatever they could find. Bark, roots, horses, even their own dogs.
The bones don’t lie. Proof of how bad it got. Not just stories, not just rumors. Real signs of people at the edge, doing what they had to just to keep breathing.
The Future of the Past: Expanding the Scope of Research
This stuff we got now, it’s just a start. Jamestown bones show one piece but there’s more out there. Dogs in early America, the story’s bigger, not simple.
The team wants more bones, other sites, better DNA. High quality samples, longer reads, whatever they can pull. Each one fills in gaps.
They’re trying to size the dogs too. Length, width, shape. Were they full native lines still, or already mixed with European stock coming in. Hard to tell yet.
Work’s not done. It keeps going, more digging, more tests. Every bone a clue, every genome another piece. All of it showing how people and dogs lived together, fought, changed, adapted in those first hard years. Messy history, not neat, but closer to the truth.
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Davin is a jack-of-all-trades but has professional training and experience in various home and garden subjects. He leans on other experts when needed and edits and fact-checks all articles.