ai-i.kn: dogs of thk amkkk an ah()1U(;im;s. 4.'i9 



Origin" of Amkruan Dogs. 



Wry little attention has been paid to the dogs of the American 

 Aborigines. At the present day it is probably too late to find pure- 

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

 Barton (l.SOo) 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. ("ope. and 

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

 domestic dogs of America must ha\e been derived from the Coyote, 

 or from some other indigenous species of Xortii or South America, 

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

 fragment of a lower jaw from Florida, ("ope (1S93) made particular 

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

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

 is true that in a large percentage of American native dogs the first 

 premolar is absent 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 this is often true, it is not always the case. A 

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

 milk-teeth capping the pennanent first premolars whicli 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 iDiportant paper of Loomis and Young (1912) and the reports 

 of Xehring on dogs from ancient Peru\ian burials comprise most of 

 the work that has l)een done in the comparati\-e dental and osteologi- 

 cal study of American dogs. There are, howe\'er, brief notices of the 

 discovery of prehistoric dog-remains and early accounts of certain 

 native dogs by travellers, the more important 'of which are included 

 in the Bibliography (p. 504-517). 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 have verified 

 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 ancestr\-. 

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

 species of the American continents, the peoples of the New ^^ orld 



