ALLEN: DOGS OF THE AMERICAN ABORIGINES. 439 



Origin of American Dogs. 



Very little attention has been paid to the dogs of tlie American 

 Aborigines. At the present day it is prol)ably too hite to find pure- 

 bred examples of most of the local varieties that formerly occurred. 

 Barton (1805) was about the only American naturalist to give much 

 thought to the matter, but the few notes he collected were taken 

 mostly at second-hand and were rather indefinite. Coues, Cope, and 

 Packard, as well as many writers following them, considered that the 

 domestic dogs of America must have been derived from the Coyote, 

 or from some other inrligenous species of North or South America. 

 Cope was the only one who made an examination of the teeth. In a 

 fragment of a lower jaw from Florida, Cope (1893) made particular 

 note of the absence of the first premolar and remarked on the large 

 size of the metaconifl and the entoconid of the lower carnassial. It 

 is true that in a large percentage of American nati\-e <logs the first 

 premolar is al)sent from the lower jaw. A similar anomaly is occasion- 

 ally seen in wolves and in European dogs, but is rare. It is usually 

 considered that the first premolar in dogs is without a milk prede- 

 cessor, but though tliis is often true, it is not always the case. A 

 jaw of a very young dog in the ^Museum collection, shows very small 

 milk-teeth capping the permanent first premolars which are nearly 

 erupted. A similar case is reported by Lataste (1888). The entire 

 suppression of the first premolar, particularly in the lower jaw, in 

 a large percentage of American dogs, is possibly a retention of the 

 usual early condition, in which there is no first milk premolar. 



The important paper of Loomis and Young (1912) and the reports 

 of Nehring on dogs from ancient Peruvian burials comprise most of 

 the work that has been done in the comparative dental and osteologi- 

 cal study of American dogs. There are, however, brief notices of the 

 discovery of prehistoric dog-ramains and early accounts of certain 

 native dogs by tra\ellers, the more important of which are included 

 in the Bibliography (p. 504-017). Miller (1912) seems to have been 

 the first to show that the teeth of American aboriginal dogs are those 

 of true dogs rather than of coyotes or wolves. This I haxe ^•erified 

 from a considerable mass of material from North America and Peru, 

 so that there can be no question but that the domestic dogs of both 

 Old and New Worlds are closely related and of common ancestrw 

 It follows that instead of having domesticated various dog- or fox-like 

 species of the Amei-ican continents, the peoples of the New World 



