Beads recovered from a cave in western Morocco, determined to be between 142,000 and 150,000 years old

The necklace, nametag, earrings or uniform you chose to put on this morning might say more than you realize about your social status, job or some other aspect of your identity.

Anthropologists say humans have been doing this – finding ways to communicate about themselves without the fuss of conversation – for millennia.

But shell beads recovered from a cave in western Morocco, determined to be between 142,000 and 150,000 years old, suggest that this behavior may go back much farther than previously thought. The finding, detailed Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, was made by a team of archaeologists that includes Steven L. Kuhn, a professor of anthropologyin the University of Arizona College of Social and Behavioral Sciences.

The beads, Kuhn and his colleagues say, are the earliest known evidence of a widespread form of nonverbal human communication, and they shed new light on how humans' cognitive abilities and social interactions evolved.

"They were probably part of the way people expressed their identity with their clothing," Kuhn said. "They're the tip of the iceberg for that kind of human trait. They show that it was present even hundreds of thousands of years ago, and that humans were interested in communicating to bigger groups of people than their immediate friends and family."

How does this ancient form of communication show up today? It happens often, Kuhn said.

"You think about how society works – somebody's tailgating you in traffic, honking their horn and flashing their lights, and you think, 'What's your problem?'" Kuhn said. "But if you see they're wearing a blue uniform and a peaked cap, you realize it's a police officer pulling you over."

Kuhn and an international team of archaeologists recovered the 33 beads between 2014 and 2018 near the mouth of Bizmoune Cave, about 10 miles inland from Essaouira, a city on Morocco's Atlantic coast.

Kuhn co-directs archaeological research at Bizmoune Cave with Abdeljalil Bouzouggar, a professor at the National Institute of Archaeological Sciences and Heritage in Rabat, Morocco, and Phillipe Fernandez, from the University Aix-Marseille in France, who are also authors on the study. El Mehdi Sehasseh, a graduate student at the National Institute of Archaeological Sciences and Heritage, who did the detailed study of the beads, is the study's lead author.

The beads uncovered by Kuhn and his collaborators were made from sea snail shells, and each measures roughly half an inch long. Holes in the center of the beads, as well as other markings from wear and tear, indicate that they were hung on strings or from clothing, Kuhn said.

The beads are like many others found at sites throughout northern and southern Africa, but previous examples date back to no older than 130,000 years. Ancient beads from North Africa are associated with the Aterian, a Middle Stone Age culture known for its distinctive stemmed spear points, whose people hunted gazelles, wildebeest, warthogs and rhinoceros, among other animals.

The beads serve as potential clues for anthropologists studying the evolution of human cognition and communication. Researchers have long been interested in when language appeared. But there was no material record of language until just a few thousand years ago, when humans began writing things down.

The beads, Kuhn said, are essentially a fossilized form of basic communication.

"We don't know what they meant, but they're clearly symbolic objects that were deployed in a way that other people could see them," he said.

The beads are also notable for their lasting form. Rather than painting their bodies or faces with ochre or charcoal, as many people did, the beads' makers made something more permanent, Kuhn said, suggesting the message they intended to convey was a lasting and important one.

In many ways, the beads raise more questions than they answer. Kuhn said he and his colleagues are now interested in learning why the Aterian people felt the need to make the beads when they did. They're exploring several possible explanations. One, Kuhn said, involves a growing population; as more people began occupying North Africa, they may have needed ways to identify themselves.

It is also possible that people in North Africa started using the method of communication at a time when the climate was cold and dry. They may have developed clans or other allegiances to protect limited resources, then perhaps used the beads to express their ethnicity or other identity to show they belonged in a certain area, Kuhn said.

"It's one thing to know that people were capable of making them," Kuhn said, "but then the question becomes, 'OK, what stimulated them to do it?'"

Other UArizona researchers involved with the study were Mary Stiner, a Regents Professor of Anthropology; Francois Lanoe, a research scientist in the Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology; and anthropology doctoral candidates Kayla Worthey and Ismael Sanchez-Morales.

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Maya rulers put their personal stamp on monumental complexes

 

 

IMAGE: MAYA RUINS IN TIKAL, GUATEMALA 2009view more 

CREDIT: IMAGE BY BY CHENSIYUAN IS LICENSED UNDER CC BY 4.0.

Early Maya cities featured monumental complexes, which centered on a shared form of religion but these complexes transformed radically once kingship emerged in 400 B.C. To solidify their power, rulers throughout the Maya lowlands would change these complexes, installing their mark on the landscape and reshaping how people remember it, according to a Dartmouth study published in Ancient Mesoamerica.

“Just as political leaders today often seek to brand themselves, so too did early Maya rulers,” says Ryan H. Collins, a postdoctoral fellow in anthropology at the Neukom Institute for Computational Science at Dartmouth. “Maya rulers seemed to have real angst about the past world and think that it could interfere with their authority, so they would try to tweak it, or even erase it altogether. These rulers saw themselves as the embodiment of the Maya sun god and wanted to put their personal stamp on the city, so monuments and the ways people experienced the city were modified to reflect a ruler’s desires over his or her lifetime.”

Collins examined data from the Maya site, Yaxuná, located in central Yucatán, Mexico, and other pyramid plaza complexes or temples known as E groups in the Maya lowlands, including San Bartolo, Tikal, Ceibal in Guatemala, and Cahal Pech in Belize, which reflected observed astronomical alignments with the equinoxes and solstices.

In the E group, each monumental complex was built along an east-west axis and was characterized by a pyramid to the west and a long-raised platform to the east. Prior research has found that the astronomical alignments of Maya complexes were likely a reference to the sun god and maize (corn) god and the annual changes of the agricultural season.

According to archaeological data from Yaxuná and the other sites, Collins found that by 400 B.C., many Maya complexes in the E Group were either built on top of existing temples, dismantled, or abandoned altogether. In many cases, new architecture would be constructed right on top of everything that was there before, where there could five, six or even seven pyramids preserved under the latest phase of construction.

“Over time, these temples became more about the rulers and less about the ritual and religion that once brought the communities together in the first place,” says Collins. At Yaxuná, in the original city center alone, there were 11 phases of construction between 900 B.C. and 100 B.C.

While new monuments within the E Group were created over old ones, some aspects were maintained through time. For example, the original eastern structure (Str. 5E-6) at Yaxuná contained a circular stone foundation on level eight, which was preserved and emphasized by later generations through a circular incised line on the floor of level six. Precious items were also found cached on levels seven and four, including a polished magnetite fragment and a ceramic vessel with greenware beads that were likely obtained through long-distance trade. “The Maya would go back and mark spaces of social significance generations later, not centuries later, illustrating how people were really emphasizing memory and continuity with things that they thought were important,” says Collins.

Other areas of the Yaxuná site and other E Group sites however, contained evidence of termination rituals. These rituals were used to destroy the energy or soul associated with a building, especially if it was sacred, such as by spreading the ash of burned incense over an area. In the eastern structure at Yaxuná, ash was found near a grinding stone, providing evidence that a former space for rituals was used to prepare food in later years.

“In archaeology, there has been the assumption that Maya kingship represented a continuity with the past but as Maya rulers altered peoples’ experience of where they lived, these rulers were actually breaking away from Mesoamerican building traditions and redefining the Maya city,” says Collins. “The first millennium of Maya culture for the E Group marks a period for not only new monuments but for the development of massive civic architecture, as large-scale roadways were built and districts began to emerge. These changes also may have driven Maya civilization’s shift from an egalitarian society to a more hierarchical structure.”

Roman-era mixers and millstones made with geology in mind

 

IMAGE: AN OLIVE MILLSTONE IN VOLUBILIS. RESEARCH ASSISTANT DREW MESSING HOLDS A TOOL FOR SCALE. view more 

CREDIT: JARED BENTON

A study on stone tools from an outpost of the Roman Empire has found that for ancient bakers and millers, having the right tools was a matter of geology.  

A team of geoscientists and archaeologists made the discovery by analyzing samples of the tools at a University of Texas at Austin geology lab, finding that dough mixing vats and millstones from Roman-era ruins of Volubilis, a city in Morocco, were made from specific rock types that probably improved each tool’s function.  

Furthermore, the researchers determined that the stones were sourced locally, a discovery that challenges a theory that some millstones had been imported from afar. It also means that the craftspeople who made the tools may have received input directly from the workers who used them.  

“It is interesting because it is a very local source and seemingly from one source,” said Jared Benton, a study co-author and an assistant professor at Old Dominion University who studies trade between Roman-era workshops. “One wonders if there’s not a group of bakers that are coming together and saying let’s buy our stuff from this one quarry, or maybe there’s just one guy who [sells the stones], and that’s it.”  

The results were published in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports. 

Derek Weller, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Tokyo’s Earthquake Research Institute, led the study. Additional co-authors include Omero “Phil” Orlandini, research associate and manager of the Electron Microbeam Laboratory at the UT Jackson School of Geosciences; Lauren LoBue and Scott Culotta, both undergraduates at the Jackson School; and Christy Schirmer, a graduate student in UT’s Department of Classics.  

The study got its start in early 2020, when Schirmer showed up at Orlandini’s lab with a box of rocks. They were pieces of the stone tools that she and Benton had collected from the tools in Volubilis – and they were curious about where learning more about their geological makeup could lead them.  

“They sort of look the same when they’re in tool form, but as soon as we started looking, it was clear that they were completely different,” Orlandini said.  

Orlandini got LoBue and Culotta on the case. The undergraduates put all 16 samples through a detailed scientific workup to determine their composition at the geochemical level.  

Their research revealed a rock type for each tool type. Grain millstones were made from vesicular basalts (a volcanic stone full of sharp-edged pores); olive mills were made from clastic, fossiliferous limestone (a limestone containing fragments of other rocks and small fossil shells); and dough mixers were made from limestone with no clastic material or fossils.  

The study notes how the rocks’ attributes relate to each tool’s function. For example, the pores in the basalt may have helped provide fresh edges that could help grind wheat into flour as the stone was worn down.  

Weller also used the geochemical data to determine that all the stones came from sources near Volubilis. Limestone is plentiful in the region, and two limestone quarries were already known to be active during the Roman era near Volubilis. But archaeologists previously thought the basalt – which Weller found came from the nearby Middle Atlas Mountains – was imported from Italy.  

In addition, the research found that each rock type came from a single location rather than sourced from different places around Volubilis. Benton said this suggests that a single supplier for each stone type might have been meeting all demand in the city and getting input from local people.   

Elizabeth Fentress, an archaeologist specializing in Roman settlements in North Africa, said that the study is a great example of collaborative research.  

“It is hardly the only collaboration between geologists and archaeologists, but an excellent one,” she said. “The key is, as here, that the archaeologists ask the right questions and use their knowledge to interpret the answers.” 

Environmental conditions of early humans in Europe

 Understanding the environmental conditions under which early humans dispersed out of Africa is important for understanding the factors that affected human evolution. This is a topical question that remains debated. A recent study prepared in collaboration with researchers from the University of Helsinki and the Universities of Granada, Tarragona, Zaragoza, Barcelona, Salamanca, Madrid and Tübingen provides new information on the environmental context of earliest human occupation in Europe during the Pleistocene.

The research is part of the Orce project (ProyectORCE) funded by the local government of Andalucía and led by the University of Granada, in which researchers from the University of Helsinki have been participating since 2017. The project is responsible for archeological/palaentological excavations and related research in Andalucía, Spain.

The study is focussed on the Guadix-Baza Basin, Andalucía, Spain, where the researchers used dental ecometric trait distribution within fossil large mammal communities to reconstruct climatic variables and net primary production of plant communities from ca. 4.5 million years to ca. 400,000 years ago.

The Guadix-Baza basin is of particular importance for understanding early human environments outside Africa, because it includes a couple of sites that are among the earliest human occupation sites in Europe, Barranco León and Fuente Nueva 3 near the city of Orce, which have been dated at ca. 1.4 -- 1.2 million years in age.

Based on the estimates, the climate in the Guadix-Baza Basin varied from roughly similar to present (e.g. Venta Micena, ca. 1.6 million years ago) to more humid, with higher annual primary production. The early human occupation sites in the Guadix-Baza Basin, such as Barranco León and Fuente Nueva 3, tended to have higher primary production than in the region today. The vegetation was mostly similar to Mediterranean forest without significant grassy undergrowth, making it different from African grass-dominated savanna environments.

Lead author Juha Saarinen from the University of Helsinki said: "Tooth wear-based dietary analyses indicate that most of the large herbivorous mammals in these environments did not consume significant amounts of grass, further attesting to the scarcity of grassy vegetation. This is an important finding, as it suggests that already the earliest human occupation sites in Europe were often different from African grassy savannas in terms of vegetation and interactions between large mammal fauna and vegetation."

The conditions under which early members of the genus Homodispersed outside Africa were also analysed on a broader scale, across Europe during the Early and Middle Pleistocene. The model is based on the comparison of functional trait distribution of large herbivorous mammals in sites with archaeological or fossil evidence of human presence and in sites, which lack evidence of human presence.

Based on the results, early humans occurred in a wide variety of environments, but were concentrated in sites where the distribution of functional traits suggests a relatively mild climate and diverse, at least partially wooded, environments, especially in the early phase of dispersal. Further, at a later stage, after humans had already established themselves in Europe during the Middle Pleistocene, humans were absent from some sites where mammalian characteristics suggest particularly severe (cold, dry, or both) conditions.

Modern activities follow the contours of ancient Teotihuacan

 A lidar mapping study using a cutting-edge aerial mapping technology shows ancient residents of Teotihuacan moved astonishing quantities of soil and bedrock for construction and reshaped the landscape in a way that continues to influence the contours of modern activities in this part of Mexico. The work is published in the open-access journal, PLOS One.

The paper also shows how Teotihuacan's engineers re-routed two rivers to align with points of astronomical significance, identified hundreds of previously unknown architectural features, and documented over 200 archaeological features that have been destroyed by mining and urbanization since the 1960s.

"We don't live in the past, but we live with the legacies of past actions. In a monumental city like Teotihuacan, the consequences of those actions are still fresh on the landscape," said first author Nawa Sugiyama, a professor of anthropology at UC Riverside.

Teotihuacan, about 25 miles northeast of modern Mexico City, was the largest city in the Americas and one of the largest anywhere in the ancient world. It existed from about 100 BCE-550 CE -- about 1,000-2,000 years ago -- and covered 8 square miles. At its height, it consisted of numerous pyramids, plazas, and well-designed residential and commercial neighborhoods housing a population of around 100,000. Some of the pyramids and other structures are visible above ground today, but most of the city's remains lie buried beneath modern fields, buildings, and other activity areas.

To map the below-ground parts of Teotihuacan, Nawa Sugiyama and co-authors Saburo Sugiyama at Arizona State University; Tanya Catignani at George Mason University; Adrian S. Z. Chase at Claremont University; and Juan C. Fernandez-Diaz at Houston University used lidar, a mapping technology that measures the amount of time it takes light from a laser to bounce back from an object. Archaeologists often use lidar to discover buried features covered by dense forests or open fields but rarely deploy the technology where archaeological remains lie beneath urban areas.

"Lidar is often perceived as revolutionary tool to find ancient features hidden in plain sight, but we found the lidar map to be extremely messy and hard to interpret. Many of the features we identified were modern with ancient roots. But then we realized there is a far more interesting story behind this trend," said Nawa Sugiyama.

Because the sheer scale of construction at Teotihuacan suggested massive modification of the ancient landscape, Sugiyama's group thought that lidar could help elucidate the relationship between the layout of Teotihuacan and modern activities that overlay it. The researchers confirmed the lidar findings with surveys by foot and comparisons to previous mapping efforts.

They found that the builders of Teotihuacan leveled the ground down to the bedrock and, in some cases, quarried the bedrock itself to use as construction and fill material. In just one portion of the city, called the Plaza of the Columns Complex, the authors calculated that roughly 372,056 square meters of artificial ground accumulated over the course of roughly 300 years of construction that had been quarried elsewhere in the Teotihuacan Valley. In three of the main pyramid complexes, the authors estimate that 2,423,411 square meters of rock, dirt, and adobe had been used.

This major reshaping of the landscape affects the arrangement of modern construction and activities. The authors found that 65% of urban areas contained property or modern features that aligned orthogonally within 3 degrees of 15 degrees east of astronomical north -- the same alignment as Teotihuacan. Rock fences were built along areas that lidar and excavation revealed to have underground ancient walls that made modern-day plowing difficult.

Teotihuacan engineers also rerouted the Rio San Juan and the San Lorenzo River, which cross the city. Rio San Juan follows the Teotihuacan orientation for 3 km as it traverses the city center while the San Lorenzo River has a very distinct orientation, 8 degrees south of astronomical east for 4.9 km. Previous research has interpreted them as major canals of symbolic and calendric significance.

The lidar map also showed that other sections of canals and rivers, many still actively used today, were altered at various points along its course, frequently coinciding with the Teotihuacan directionalities. A total of 16.9 km of the hydrological systems visible on the modern terrain had origins in the Early Classic Teotihuacan landscape.

On the lidar map, the group identified 298 features and 5,795 human-made terraces that had not been previously recorded. However, they also identified over 200 known features that have been destroyed by mining since 2015.

"We can't fight modern urbanization. The lidar map provides a snapshot of these ancient features that are being abolished at an alarming rate that would otherwise go unnoticed. It's one of many ways we can preserve our heritage landscape," said Nawa Sugiyama.

The authors plan to use their lidar map to create a three-dimensional geospatial database that allows them to visualize stratigraphic and surface data, natural and artificial features, and to document the true extent of humans as geomorphic agents over long periods of time in the Teotihuacan Valley.

South American musical instruments reflect population relationships

 

 

IMAGE: A CERAMIC FIGURINE FROM THE MOCHE CULTURE OF THE NORTH COAST OF PERU, DEPICTING A HUMAN FIGURE PLAYING THE PANPIPE. view more 

CREDIT: AGUIRRE-FERNÁNDEZ / MUSEUM ZU ALLERHEILIGEN, SAMMLUNG EBNÖTHER.

Music is an intrinsic expression of cultural diversity and a fundamental element of identity, ritual symbolism, and daily social interaction. The study of material culture, and musical instruments in particular, represents therefore a relevant and innovative tool to characterize societies and reconstruct their historical trajectories and relationships in time and space.

South America harbors a rich diversity of cultures and languages, which are shaped by different demographic scenarios and adapted to a variety of ecologies and landscapes. In this study, a joint project with the University of Zurich and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, researchers analyzed music diversity over the entire South American continent with a systematic review of the different instruments found in both the archaeological and ethnographic record, with a focus on Indigenous knowledge and pre-colonial history.

Exceptional diversity from the archaeological record

The authors started by reviewing one of the most popular classifications of global organology (the study of musical instruments): the system of von Hornbostel and Sachs, assembled at the beginning of the 20th century. The classification breaks down from four main classes of instruments: idiophones (vibration of the instrument itself e.g., a rattle), membranophones (vibration of a membrane, e.g., a drum), chordophones (vibration of strings, e.g., a guitar), and aerophones (vibration of wind, e.g., a flute).

Gabriel Aguirre-Fernández, a paleontologist from the University of Zurich and first author of the study, started his journey into musical diversity from a macroevolutionary perspective, interested in shapes and functions. Together with PhD student Anna Graff from the University of Zurich and a team of South American-based ethnomusicologists and archaeologists, they expanded and refined this classification, incorporating 40 years of work documented by ethnomusicologist and coauthor José Pérez de Arce from the University of Chile.

“One finding of our systematic review is the prominent role of aerophones for South America in comparison to other continents, particularly in the archaeological record,” says Aguirre-Fernández. “Even considering that not all materials used to make instruments have equal chances of being preserved—organic materials such as plants and bones do not preserve as well as inorganic materials like stone and clay —more than one third of the aerophones in South America were found exclusively in archaeological excavations, with no records of usage in the more recent ethnographic record. This suggests that many kinds of instruments went extinct, and are no longer part of the musical repertoire of Indigenous populations. The influence of European colonizers, who massively disrupted the local cultural repertoire, is likely playing a part in these extinction events,” adds Graff.

Cultural and linguistic connections

From a cultural evolution perspective, the sharing of instruments can testify to a shared historical path. The transmission of knowledge is influenced by two modalities: vertical transmission, with information passing within a group from one generation to the next, and horizontal transmission, with information passing through contact with peers or other groups.

Chiara Barbieri, a geneticist working at the University of Zurich and affiliated to the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, works with the demographic and linguistic history of South America. “We found groups who speak related languages and share the same set of instruments, and this can describe particularly meaningful connections, with stable vertical transmission of cultural features and materials,” says Barbieri, who co-led the study. “We also recovered east-west connections across the Amazonian basin, with groups sharing the same or similar instrument sets at long geographic distances. These findings, contextualized with historical, archaeological, linguistic and genetic evidence, have a strong potential to illuminate past chapters in South American history.”

“The panpipes are particularly interesting,” adds Aguirre-Fernández. “We focused on them in a case study because of their great diversity of forms and widespread presence in the continent. By analyzing panpipe features in different societies, we recovered relationships which mirror regional and cultural areas of influence, corresponding to the northern Andes, the southern Andes, and an Amazonian core.”

Digital catalogues of material culture

Marcelo Sánchez-Villagra, paleontologist from the University of Zurich who coordinated the study, highlights the importance of cataloguing human artifacts into such systematic collections. By traveling to museums and discussing his findings with musicologists and anthropologists, he is convinced that this work is as relevant as existing research on other artifacts, like ceramic styles, which are more commonly studied at broad geographic scales.

“We hope to continue our study with more fine-grained mapping of musical instruments and discussing the relevance of their features for performance and music production. With an even more robust dataset it will be possible to test questions of cultural evolution and apply advanced models to the data,” concludes Sánchez-Villagra.

Early long-distance trade links shaped Siberian dogs

Peer-Reviewed Publication

Analysis of ancient canine DNAs reveals that the inhabitants of Arctic Siberia began importing dogs from Eurasia some 2000 years ago.

Archaeological finds show that people in the Arctic regions of Northwestern Siberia had already established long-range trading links with Eurasian populations some 2000 years ago. The initiation of trading relationships was one of a series of significant social changes that took place during this period. Moreover, these changes even had an impact on the genomes of Siberian dogs, as an international team of researchers led by LMU palaeogeneticist Laurent Frantz has now demonstrated. Based on extensive genetic analyses, the team concludes that dogs were imported into the Siberian Arctic, and that this process ultimately led to the establishment of Siberian breeds such as the samoyed.

 

Genomes dating from the Stone Age to the Holocene

 

The researchers analyzed the genomes of 49 dogs from sites in Siberia and Eurasia dating to between 60 and about 11,000 years ago. Four of the dogs originated from Ust-Polui, where Russian and Canadian archeologists have uncovered the remains of more than 100 dogs dating back to about 2000 years ago. Numerous finds indicate that this site on the remote Yamal peninsula in Northwestern Siberia was in use – most probably for ceremonial purposes – over a period of about 400 years. “Some of the dogs found there appear to have been intentionally buried,” says Dr. Robert Losey, from the University of Alberta, and lead archeologist of the study. “But there is also evidence which suggests that many were eaten. Dogs were used for a variety of purposes – not only as a means of transport, but potentially also hunting partners and as sources of food.”

 

The artefacts uncovered in Ust-Polui include glass beads and objects made of metal, which cannot have been fabricated locally. They must have been sourced from the steppe zone, the Black Sea region or the Near East. Therefore, the people who lived on the Yamal peninsula must have been integrated into long-range trading networks more than 2000 years ago. This was also a time of significant social and technological change – as indicated by the exploitation of iron ore and artifacts related to reindeer harnessing both being evidenced at the site. Large-scale reindeer pastoralism, now widely practiced by Indigenous people in this region, emerged here only in the last few centuries.

 

Dogs as trade goods

 

The new genetic analyses revealed that dogs were also among the goods imported into the Siberian Arctic imported from areas further to the south at this time. “Whereas Arctic dogs evolved in isolation prior to at least 7000 years ago, genomic DNA isolated from Siberian dogs dated to between the Iron Age and medieval times shows that there were increasing portions of genetic material derived from dogs from the Eurasian steppes, as well as Europe," says Dr. Tatiana Feuerborn, the lead author on the paper based at the University of Copenhagen. Thus, the proportion of non-Siberian ancestry among dogs on the Yamal peninsula increased significantly during this period. “Dogs were potentially valuable possessions, and they were bought and sold,” says Frantz. On the other hand, human genomes in Arctic Siberia remained quite stable over this long stretch of time, and there is little sign of genetic input from non-Arctic populations.

 

The authors of the new study assume that the import of dogs from farther afield is a reflection of societal transitions in Siberia. “The first dogs domesticated in the Arctic served primarily as sledding dogs,” says Frantz. “When Siberian populations turned to pastoralism, they may well have required dogs that had other useful behavioral traits, which were better suited for reindeer herding. The mixing of Arctic dogs with other populations potentially led to the establishment of dog lineages that were both suited to herding and also adapted to the harsh climatic conditions.”

 

From working dog to samoyed

 

This strategy of cross-breeding and selection for improved traits eventually led to the emergence of modern Siberian canine lineages such as the samoyed. “A large fraction of the samoyed genome can be traced back to ancestral Arctic bloodlines,” says Frantz, “but it also shows far more Western influence than the husky, for instance.” Because very little subsequent hybridization with other breeds has occurred in the meantime, yet samoyeds have remained largely unchanged since the Middle Ages. In contrast, most other modern breeds result from the targeted efforts of breeders during the 19th and 20th centuries. Only when polar explorers such as Ernest Shackleton obtained dogs from the Arctic and began to breed from them did the samoyed acquire its modern name. “Prior to that they were simply a population of working dogs,” says Frantz.

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