Tracking the origin of man's best friend

ALONG THE JAMES RIVER

Confronted with two paths that diverged in a wood, Jeff Blick chose the one more or less traveled - by himself - 20 years ago.

Are you sure? asked his wife, Susan, and to his everlasting credit, Blick said no.

"I don't think I've been here since '89," he said, turning down the track to his right. "I could be wrong."

As a young archaeologist, Blick helped make an astounding discovery here - the skeletons of 112 dogs buried by Native Americans nearly 1,000 years ago.

He is still studying the bones, and he's hoping the latest tests will help guide scientists tracing another uncertain path: the ancient transformation of wolf to dog.

 ---------

"This is more how I remember it," Blick said, looking with approval upon gentle undulations in the land. The low spots were filled with water, and the high spots were filled with mud. An intermittent rain fell, but this was the day Blick had available to find his way back to the dig site he had left decades before.

He just wanted to see it again - the 13 or so years spent digging ended in the '80s. The work, however, continues. In his archaeology lab at Georgia College and State University, Blick and his students retrieved DNA samples from the dog skeletons and recently sent them to California and Germany for analysis.

"For every year you spend in the field, you spend six years analyzing," Blick said. "I guess we're on track."

The ability to do such DNA work is relatively recent; deciphering of the dog genome is not quite complete. Not surprisingly, all dogs carry some wolf genes, indicating that every breed, from chihuahuas to Newfoundlands, arose from a common ancestor.

"There has to be some behavioral point where they become dependent on humans," Blick said. "You can tame a wolf puppy, but it's still going to be a wolf. Over generations, selecting for behavior, you wind up with a dog whose behavior and characteristics are useful to us."

Differences in size, shape, color and temperament result from human dabbling. Breeders mate dogs that will produce characteristics desired in the puppies, and doing so is sometimes remarkably easy: A single gene gives short legs to dachshunds and terriers.

The prehistoric dogs from Virginia stood about 16 inches high, about the size of today's Shetland sheepdog, and ranged from 18 to 32 pounds. Their color? Unknown, but Blick hopes DNA will provide an answer.

"Something else - Columbus mentions in the Caribbean, and the Spanish and English and French mention it up the eastern seaboard to the Canadian maritimes to the Great Lakes and all the way out to the northwest coast, that these dogs were bark-less," Blick said. "They did not bark, but howled instead. They called them wolflike in appearance. One of the questions I have is: Is there a gene for barking? Is that gene turned off in these dogs, or is it a behavioral trait that they learned?"

Most importantly, the Virginia dogs are old - too old to have interbred with those of European colonists. The Virginia skeletons date from around 1020 to 1273 A.D., some 300 to 600 years before the English arrived.

"This could be a glimpse of the pure American dog," Blick said. "A lot of these aboriginal American dogs have either gone extinct or they were intermixed with European breeds to the point that they're no longer the same as they were."

The big question is where those original dogs came from.

A 2002 study concluded that wolves were domesticated in eastern Asia and crossed the Bering land bridge with humans into the Americas. In 2009, another study reached a different conclusion: that the earliest dogs came from Eurasia or northern Africa and spread, along with humans, throughout the world.

Another possibility exists - that dogs were domesticated not just in one location but in many, including North America. With the Virginia skeletons, Blick hopes to shed some light on that prospect.

 ---------

"Yeah, there's the creek," Blick said, as his wife wondered aloud whether they had walked a mile yet through the woods.

Both were students at Virginia Commonwealth University when they heard about the archaeological dig. They volunteered on weekends at first, and Blick eventually joined the staff, excavating a site that had been occupied by humans for at least 10,000 years. Its exact location Blick tries to keep secret to protect it from relic hunters.

About 2 million artifacts were recovered during the dig, he said, by the Virginia Foundation for Archaeological Research Inc., which was headed by Leverette Gregory. Included were bits of pottery and heat-cracked rock from campfires, piles of clam and mussel shells, arrowheads and dart points, metal and other trade goods brought by Europeans, and the largest collection of prehistoric dog skeletons ever found in North America.

"It ranks in the top three or four sites in the world," Blick said.

Most of the dogs had been buried deliberately; a few appeared to have been tossed into the trash. Four other sites of similar age along the Chickahominy River also produced a few dog burials, but nothing to compare with what Blick and his colleagues uncovered.

In the years since digging ended, the collection has been in storage, Gregory has aged and Blick has kept the dog skeletons on loan, working with them now and again between other projects. Little information has been published from the dig. Blick is seeking benefactors to help preserve all the artifacts and make them available for study.

"Getting it out of the ground is actually the easy part," he said, and that includes retracing steps unwalked for 20 years. After an hour, he decided he had taken a wrong turn and began to backtrack.

 ---------

Figuring out the role of dogs in Native American life is a matter of interpreting what happened to them after death. Various scholars have proposed that dogs were used to track game, that they were eaten or that they were sacrificed to please or appease the gods of war, hunting and the afterlife.

Blick thinks he has evidence of all those things in the Virginia skeletons.

"They range in age from fetal unborn puppies all the way through really old, gnarly adults with arthritis and osteoporosis," he said. "Most of them were individually buried, and most of them were naturalistic in their posture, curled up in a semi circle like they were asleep. Three seem to have been sacrificed."

One of the three was buried on the feet of an elderly woman, with a pot placed on top of it. The other two dogs were buried separately, each with the forearm of a man - war trophies?

"The two buried with the arms were in contorted postures," Blick said, "upside down and legs splayed, and head and neck twisted. I think those three dogs got snuffed."

A few dogs had pots or cups buried with them, while others seem to have been less valued.

"Some of them seem to have been just thrown in a pit with the trash. And people, too," Blick said. "We have people there that are buried ceremoniously, and then we have some that look like they were thrown in the pit and their feet didn't quite go in all the way."

Several dogs had bony growths in their chests and limbs, a disease with a modern counterpart, Blick said. He hopes to start case studies on that soon. But first he awaits the DNA results, and their contribution to the question of whether the American dog is an import or the descendant of American wolves.

 ---------

Returning to the fork in the path, Blick went left, and after a lot more mud and steps, he stopped and said, "This is it."

He looked around with satisfaction. Susan picked a fruit off a prickly pear cactus and wondered aloud what it tasted like. Blick bit into it.

"It's actually pretty good," he said. "It's very seedy. Sweet."

Prickly pears would have been eaten by the Native Americans, he said. Their dogs, based on stomach contents, ate meat.

"We've got dog tummies that were full of fish," Blick said. "Fish and turtle and turkey. Rodent. It also appears that one male dog ate a puppy."

There is no evidence that any dog was butchered or cooked, he said, although the Iroquois and Algonquins were known to eat dogs. However, some of the dogs had injuries.

"You have a lot of broken bones around the eyes, broken ribs, like they were hit with a stick, like somebody kicked them in the ribs," Blick said. "One dog seems to have been beheaded, interestingly enough."

He wandered the site for a while, happy to find no sign of disturbance. He is eager for the DNA tests to come back. He expects them to be either boringly repetitive - his words - or spectacular, a real jaw dropper, confirming a separate North American domestication.

Eventually it was time to hike back to the car, wherever it was. The day before, on the trip from Georgia, it had been full of cats.

"I am not a dog owner," Blick said. "I'm a cat fanatic. I have 112 dogs in the lab, I've got five cats at home. Strange and curious, right?"

The cats sometimes travel with him, as they did this trip, spending the holidays snug and warm at his father's house in Richmond. Blick has never longed for canine companionship.

"This whole interest with dogs was just a random act of nature. It just fell in my lap. Life is like that sometimes."

But honestly, in some cases, say in the dripping woods where two paths diverge, a bloodhound could occasionally be handy.

Diane Tennant, (757) 446-2478, diane.tennant@pilotonline.com