Los Angeles County Museum of Art 



Two hairless puppies at play, right, were immortalized by a 

 Colima artist. The earliest Mexican sculptures of the hairless 

 dog precede by a thousand years the first such portrayals 

 in Peru. Ecuadorean sea traders, such as the Salangone or 

 their predecessors, map below, may have introduced the 

 breed into South America. 



Joe LeMonnier 



boniness normally concealed by fur. Other 

 Colima pots show dogs whose teeth are 

 abnormal or even misssing entirely, a typ- 

 ical trait of the hairless breed {see "A 

 Lethal Gene," page 39). 



Early chroniclers do not mention en- 

 countering hairless dogs in Peru, although 

 the animals are amply represented in the 

 region's art. Nineteenth-century reports in- 

 dicate that the animals were confined 

 mainly to the coast, as they are today. The 

 cold Andean highlands offered no haven 

 for such bare creatures. The explorer-car- ' 

 tographer J. J. von Tschudi mentions that 

 in the 1840s hakless dogs were found in 

 the higher altitudes, but only in warm val- 

 leys, in carefully protected circumstances. 

 The Inca, who ruled Peru when the 

 Spaniards arrived, probably were unable 

 to maintain the dog in their 12,000-foot- 

 high capital city (today's Cuzco). But the 

 animal does appear in the art of coastal 

 peoples within the Inca empire. 



In Peru, the earUest-known representa- 



tions of hairless dogs date to about a.d. 

 750. One is a ceramic bottle made by the 

 Moche people, who lived in the coastal 

 river valleys of the north, from Piura south 

 to Huarmey. Modeled on the bottle are two 

 spotted, hairless dogs. Moche pottery was 

 cream and brick red, allowing the artist to 

 show the dogs' spotted markings. (The 

 skin of today's hairless dogs ranges widely 

 in color, from sohd black or elephant gray 

 to mottled or spotted combinations of 

 pink, brown, black, and white, and even all 

 white.) Another vessel, in cream and 

 black, shows a wrinkled, bony, black dog. 

 Its shape and style suggest that it is about 

 as old as the Moche bottle, but it cannot be 

 attributed to a particular culture, in part be- 

 cause, like many ceramics, it was not un- 

 earthed by archeologists. 



Mexico's Colima artists seem to have 

 modeled hairless dogs fully one thousand 

 years before their Peruvian counterparts 

 began to do so. Could the animals have ex- 

 isted in Peru and have simply been ig- 



36 Natural History 2/94 



