An ancient bone from a dog, discovered in a cave in southeast Alaska, hints at when and how humans entered the Americas at the end of the Ice Age.
The bone, just the fragment of a femur, comes from a dog that lived about 10,150 years ago, based on radiocarbon dating.
The timing of that split suggests that the dog’s ancestors, probably following along with humans, had left Asia by around that time.
“Dogs’ movement and domestication is obviously very, very closely associated with humans. So the interesting thing is, if you’re following dogs’ movement, it can tell you something about humans as well,” says Charlotte Lindqvist, an evolutionary biologist at the University at Buffalo in New York.
The bone, just the fragment of a femur, comes from a dog that lived about 10,150 years ago, based on radiocarbon dating.
The timing of that split suggests that the dog’s ancestors, probably following along with humans, had left Asia by around that time.
“Dogs’ movement and domestication is obviously very, very closely associated with humans. So the interesting thing is, if you’re following dogs’ movement, it can tell you something about humans as well,” says Charlotte Lindqvist, an evolutionary biologist at the University at Buffalo in New York.
