If any dog has held much of a cultural, economic, and spiritual significance to the Indigenous nations in the Pacific Northwest Coast, it was the Coast Salish woolly dog. In British Columbia, Washington and Oregon, their fluffy fleece and thick undercoats were sheared like sheep by high-status women and spun together to weave colorful blankets and textiles. In a new study, a team of researchers from the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History partnered with Coast Salish Indigenous communities to explore the breed’s origins and sudden disappearance. The researchers analyzed the 160-year-old pelt of an extinct woolly dog named Mutton, the last known of its breed. The fluffy canine died in 1859 under the care of naturalist and ethnographer George Gibbs. The pelt has since resided in the museum, and its existence was little known until it was rediscovered in the early 2000s. After studying the genome in the pelt, researchers say numerous sociocultural factors are likely responsible for the species’ disappearance. Chief among them were the impacts of European colonization. Although Mutton’s genetics could tell little about what caused this dog’s death, this is the first time the genome of a woolly dog has been sequenced, said Audrey Lin, corresponding author and evolutionary molecular biologist from the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. Based on the genetic data, they estimated that woolly dogs biologically evolved from other breeds about 5,000 years ago. The team found out that nearly 85% of Mutton’s ancestry was linked to precolonial dogs before the…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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