January 21, 2025
Former Anthropology undergraduate Ryan Frome and faculty member Dr. Brian M. Kemp co-published a study about ancient relations between canids (dogs, foxes, wolves, coyotes) and some of the earliest human inhabitants of North America/Beringia in Science Advances. Under Kemp's mentorship at LMAMR, Frome mastered the necessary tools to different canids to the species level by studying DNA found in the ancient remains of these different critters.
This is next to impossible to do by morphological assessment of the bones alone. With confidence in Frome and Kemp's species assessments, collaborators at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks combined these data with stable isotopic data (indicative of past dietary consumption), to enrich our understanding of human/canid relations in the very distant past.
Guess what? It's complicated.
François Lanoë et al. Late Pleistocene onset of mutualistic human/canid (Canis spp.) relationships in subarctic Alaska. Sci. Adv. 10, eads1335(2024). DOI:10.1126/sciadv.ads1335
