Dog Days on the Plains: A Preliminary aDNA Analysis of Canid Bones from Southern Alberta and Saskatchewan
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Dogs were an important component of lifeways on the Northern Plains until the reintroduction of the horse following European contact. There has been little investigation into the variability of domesticcanids on the Prairies and the potential of that variability as a proxy for identifying relationships between culture-historic entities. Distinguishing between sympatric canids using morphological characteristics can be challenging with degraded specimens that have high intra-specific variability, and where wolf-dog hybridization can result in transitional morphologies. Here, we present preliminary ancient DNA data on archaeological canids recovered from FM Ranch (EfPk-1) and Cluny (EePf-1) in Alberta, as well as fromLake Midden (EfNg-1) in Saskatchewan. Using the mitochondrial control region, we taxonomically reclassify zooarchaeological remains, find potential evidence of European dogs in a protocontact component, and identify preliminary indications of a distinct dog population at the Cluny site that may beof interest for determining the origin of the One Gun phase.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".