Coast Salish researchers analyze 160-year-old indigenous dog skin

Researchers at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History have conducted a new analysis that sheds light on the ancestry and genetics of woolly dogs, a now-extinct breed of dog that was an integral part of indigenous Coast Salish communities of the Pacific Northwest for millennia. Anthropologist Logan Kistler and evolutionary molecular biologist Audrey Lin analyzed genetic clues preserved in the skin of “Mutton,” the world’s only known woolly fleece, to identify the genes responsible for their highly sought-after woolly fur.

The results of the study, published in the journal Scienceinclude interviews by several Coast Salish co-authors, including elders, knowledge keepers, and master weavers, who provided crucial context on the role woolly dogs played in Coast Salish society.

“The traditional Coast Salish perspective provided the overall context for understanding the study results,” said Kistler, the museum’s curator of archaeobotanics and archaeogenomics.

The Coast Salish Tribal Nations of Washington and British Columbia have bred and cared for woolly dogs for thousands of years. Valued for their thick undercoat, dogs were sheared like sheep and often kept in pens or on islands to carefully manage their breeding and care for their health and vitality.

Coast Salish weavers used the dogs’ wool to make blankets and other woven objects that served a variety of ceremonial and spiritual purposes. Woolly dogs themselves possessed spiritual significance and were often treated as beloved members of the family. As emblems of many Coast Salish communities, woolly dogs adorned woven baskets and other forms of art.

By the mid-19th century, this once-thriving tradition of weaving dog wool was in decline. In the late 1850s, naturalist and ethnographer George Gibbs cared for a woolly dog ​​named Mutton. When Mutton died in 1859, Gibbs sent his pelt to the newly formed Smithsonian Institution, where the fleece has resided ever since. However, few people knew of the existence of this skin until its rediscovery in the early 2000s.

Lin first discovered Mutton when she was a Peter Buck Postdoctoral Fellow at the museum in 2021.

“When I first saw Mutton in person, I was overwhelmed with enthusiasm,” said Lin, who is now a postdoctoral researcher at the American Museum of Natural History. “I had heard from other people that he was a little scruffy, but I thought he looked beautiful.”

She was surprised to learn that virtually no work had been done on the genetics of woolly dogs, which became extinct around the turn of the 20th century. She teamed up with Kistler and they contacted several Coast Salish communities to gauge their interest in working together on a possible woolly dog ​​research project.

Many members of the Coast Salish communities were eager to share their knowledge.

“We were very excited to participate in a study that encompasses the most sophisticated Western science and the most established traditional knowledge,” said Michael Pavel, an elder in the Skokomish/Twana Coast Salish community in Washington, who remembers Heard about woolly dogs at first. his childhood. “It was incredibly rewarding to contribute to this effort to embrace and celebrate our understanding of the woolly dog.”

To complement the perspectives they received from Pavel and other Coast Salish people from British Columbia and Washington (the text of their interviews is available in the study’s supplemental materials), Lin , Kistler and their colleagues began analyzing Mutton’s genetic code.

They sequenced the woolly dog ​​genome and compared it to the genomes of ancient and modern dog breeds to determine what sets woolly dogs apart. They also identified certain chemical signatures called isotopes in sheepskin to determine the dog’s diet and teamed up with renowned natural history illustrator Karen Carr to create a realistic recreation of what sheep looked like in the 1970s. 1850. Carr’s work is the first in-depth reconstruction of a Coast Salish woolly dog ​​in nearly three decades.

Based on the genetic data, the team estimated that woolly dogs diverged from other breeds 5,000 years ago, a date that matches archaeological remains in the area. They also discovered that the sheep was genetically similar to the precolonial dogs of Newfoundland and British Columbia.

Researchers estimate that nearly 85% of Mutton’s ancestors can be linked to precolonial dogs. This ancient ancestry is surprising because the sheep lived decades after the introduction of European dog breeds. It is therefore likely that Coast Salish communities continued to retain the unique genetic makeup of woolly dogs until these dogs were wiped out.

In total, the team analyzed more than 11,000 different genes in Mutton’s genome to determine what gave woolly dogs their downy fleece and wool fibers that could be spun together to create yarn. They identified 28 genes linked to hair growth and follicle regeneration. These include a gene responsible for the woolly hair phenotype in humans and another linked to curly hair in other dogs. Similar genes were even activated in the genome of woolly mammoths.

However, Mutton’s genetics couldn’t tell researchers much about the causes of the dogs’ decline. Traditionally, researchers have hypothesized that the arrival of machine-made blankets to the region in the early 19th century rendered wool dogs unusable. But the reflections of Pavel and other traditional experts revealed that it was unlikely that such a central part of Coast Salish society could be replaced.

Instead, woolly dogs were likely doomed by many of the factors that impacted the Coast Salish tribal nations after the arrival of European settlers. Due to disease and colonial policies of cultural genocide, displacement, and forced assimilation, it likely became increasingly difficult, if not prohibited, for Coast Salish communities to maintain their wool dogs.

“That’s thousands of years of very careful maintenance lost in a few generations,” Lin said.

But despite their disappearance, the memory of woolly dogs is still ingrained in Coast Salish society. And Pavel thinks their understanding of woolly dogs is only becoming clearer thanks to new research efforts.

“All of our communities held some aspect of knowledge about the woolly dog,” Pavel said. “But when woven together, through our participation in this study, we now have a much more complete understanding.”