WIKIMEDIA, SUE AND MARTY CURTIS
Domesticated dogs were already widespread in North America by the time Europeans first came to the continent in the 15th century, according to a study in the Journal of Human Evolution. Researchers from the University of Illinois sequenced mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) from 42 dogs whose remains were found at centuries-old archeological sites and compared those data to previously published sequences. They found that ancient migrants to North America likely domesticated dogs around 9,000 years ago—more than 6,000 years after the first Eurasians crossed into the continent. “We were interested in seeing if we could see when dogs arrived in the Americas,” study coauthor Kelsey Witt of the University of Illinois told The Washington Post in January. “By the time Europeans arrived, they were pretty widely ...
