Living with People can be Bad for your Health: Tooth Loss and Trauma in Northern Wolves and Dogs

Summary

Humans and dogs have long engaged in complex relationships, ranging from loving and intimate, to extremely violent and exploitive. Archaeology has tended to focus on the former, mostly ignoring the sometimes-ample evidence for trauma and tooth loss in remains of ancient dogs. Inferring the causes of such lesions on ancient dog remains has proven difficult, in part because of the lack of comparative data for canids living outside of the human niche. This paper compares patterns of cranial trauma and tooth loss in a large sample of modern wolves and dogs from northern parts of North America and Russia. Our data demonstrate that tooth loss and fracture are far more common in the dogs than among the wolves. These patterns seem to be related to a high degree of self-provisioning among the dogs, which included scavenging on hard food items. Cranial fractures also are far more common in the dogs than the wolves. The etiologies of these lesions are numerous, but many are entirely consistent with blows to the head from humans. Dogs’ abilities to self-provision and sustain injuries were likely important to both their original domestication and their long-term continued use in harsh northern environments.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Nose to Tail: An Interdisciplinary Look at Dogs in the Past   •
• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage