An early dog from Southeast Alaska supports a coastal route for the first dog migration into the Americas
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The oldest confirmed remains of domestic dogs in North America are from mid-continent archeological sites dated ~9,900 calibrated years before present (cal BP). Although this date suggests that dogs may not have arrived alongside the first Native Americans, the timing and routes for the entrance of New World dogs are unclear. Here, we present a complete mitochondrial genome of a dog from Southeast Alaska, dated to 10,150 ± 260 cal BP. We compared this high-coverage genome with data from modern dog breeds, historical Arctic dogs, and American precontact dogs (PCDs) from before European arrival. Our analyses demonstrate that the ancient dog shared a common ancestor with PCDs that lived ~14,500 years ago and diverged from Siberian dogs around 16,000 years ago, coinciding with the minimum suggested date for the opening of the North Pacific coastal (NPC) route along the Cordilleran Ice Sheet and genetic evidence for the initial peopling of the Americas. This ancient Southeast Alaskan dog occupies an early branching position within the PCD clade, indicating it represents a close relative of the earliest PCDs that were brought alongside people migrating from eastern Beringia southward along the NPC to the rest of the Americas. The stable isotope δ13C value of this early dog indicates a marine diet, different from the younger mid-continent PCDs’ terrestrial diet. Although PCDs were largely replaced by modern European dog breeds, our results indicate that their population decline started ~2,000 years BP, coinciding with the expansion of Inuit peoples, who are associated with traditional sled-dog culture. Our findings suggest that dogs formed part of the initial human habitation of the New World, and provide insights into their replacement by both Arctic and European lineages.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".