Creationism in Crisis - The Woolly Dogs Of The American Coast Salish People Predate 'Creation Week'

Researchers, Coast Salish People Analyze 160-Year-Old Indigenous Dog Pelt in the Smithsonian’s Collection | Smithsonian Institution

The reconstructed woolly dog shown at scale with Arctic dogs and spitz breeds in the background to compare scale and appearance; the portrayal does not imply a genetic relationship.

Credit: Karen Carr.

During that long period of Earth's 'pre-Creation Week' history, before anyone told the people of Siberia that they should wait to be created then wiped out in a genocidal flood before forgetting all about it and only then going to live elsewhere, they migrated to North America, taking their domestic dogs with them.

This is the sort of nonsense that creationism requires you to believe in order to reconcile the scientific evidence with the creation myths of a bunch of Bronze Age Canaanite farmers who thought Earth was small, flat and had a dome over it to keep the water above the sky out. Obviously, these people had almost certainly never heard of Siberia or North America or realised that there were other people living there and were as ignorant of most of Earth's long history as they were of cosmology, biology and geology.

One of the things the Bronze Age Canaanites would never have guessed was that some of the domestic dogs the Siberians took with them had genes for a dense wooly fur that could be woven into blankets and other fabrics, but now a team of researchers from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History have carried out a detailed DNA analysis of the pelt of the last known example of this breed of dog (a dog known as Mutton). Mutton died in 1859 and his pelt was sent to the Smithsonian Institute where it remained until it was rediscovered in the early 2000's.

The analysis has shown that the line diverged from the other dogs about 5,000 years ago (i.e., before creationist superstition says all life on Earth was exterminated in a genocidal flood when their 'all-loving' god flew into a rage because its creation wasn't working as intended).

They have shown that its closes genetic relationship is with the pre-colonial dogs from Newfoundland and British Columbia. The Indigenous Coast Salish communities in the Pacific Northwest (in Washington state and British Columbia) for millennia held these wooly dogs in high esteem, regarding them almost as family members and often keeping them in pens or on islands to prevent them interbreeding with other dogs, to maintain the quality of their wool. This isolation prevented the ingress of genes from other dogs and even from the dogs later colonists brought with them. The genes recovered from Mutton's pelt show that 85% of his genes were from pre-colonial dogs.

The Smithsonian researchers have, with the assistance of Coast Salish Elders, Knowledge Keepers and Master Weavers, now traced the place of the woolly dogs in Coastal Salish culture and the reasons for its decline. Their findings are published in Science and tell a sorry tale of colonial destruction of a people and their culture. Instead of, as has been suggested, the arrival of machinery and woven blankets made the wooly dogs expendable, the truth is that, due to disease and colonial policies of cultural genocide, displacement and forced assimilation, it likely became increasingly difficult or forbidden for Coast Salish communities to maintain their woolly dogs and a 1000 years or more of careful selective breeding was wiped out within a couple of generations.

Abstract

Ancestral Coast Salish societies in the Pacific Northwest kept long-haired “woolly dogs” that were bred and cared for over millennia. However, the dog wool–weaving tradition declined during the 19th century, and the population was lost. In this study, we analyzed genomic and isotopic data from a preserved woolly dog pelt from “Mutton,” collected in 1859. Mutton is the only known example of an Indigenous North American dog with dominant precolonial ancestry postdating the onset of settler colonialism. We identified candidate genetic variants potentially linked with their distinct woolly phenotype. We integrated these data with interviews from Coast Salish Elders, Knowledge Keepers, and weavers about shared traditional knowledge and memories surrounding woolly dogs, their importance within Coast Salish societies, and how colonial policies led directly to their disappearance.

Dogs were introduced to the Americas from Eurasia via northwestern North America ~15,000 years ago and have been ubiquitous in Indigenous societies of the Pacific Northwest (PNW) for millennia (1–4). Coast Salish peoples in the Salish Sea region (Fig. 1A) kept multiple different types of dogs: hunting dogs, village dogs, and “woolly dogs” with a thick woolen undercoat that was shorn for weaving (4, 5). Dog-wool blankets, often blended with mountain goat wool, waterfowl down, and plant fibers such as fireweed and cattail fluff, were prestigious cultural belongings (6–8). Woolly dogs, known as “sqwemá:y,” “ske’-ha,” “sqʷəméy̓,” “sqwbaý,” and “q’əbəɫ” in some Coast Salish languages (9), were emblems of some communities, as depicted in a 19th-century Skokomish/Twana basket (Fig. 1B) (10).

Fig. 1. Domestic dogs in the culture and society of Indigenous Coast Salish peoples.
(A) Coast Salish ancestral lands include the inner coastal waterways of the Salish Sea in southwest British Columbia and Washington State. Archaeological woolly dog data are from (2). Distribution of the Coast Salish languages in the 19th century are as indicated by colored areas. [The map is modified from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Coast_Salish_language_map.svg and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.] (B) Woven Skokomish/Twana basket with woolly dog iconography, depicted with upturned tails. Woolly dog puppies are inside pens represented by diamond shapes (10) [courtesy of Burke Museum, catalog no. 1-507]. (C) Forensic reconstruction of a woolly dog based on Mutton’s pelt measurements and archaeological remains (9). Sketches of Arctic and spitz dog breeds are shown for scale and comparison of appearance and do not imply a genetic relationship.

The only known pelt of an extinct Coast Salish woolly dog is of “Mutton,” a dog cared for by naturalist and ethnographer George Gibbs during the Northwest Boundary Survey (1857–1862). According to Gibbs’s field journal and Smithsonian ledgers [National Museum of Natural History (USNM) A4401 to A4425], Mutton became ill and died in late 1859 (9, 15). His pelt and lower leg bones are housed at the Smithsonian Institution (USNM 4762) (figs. S2 and S4).

Fig. 2. Genetic ancestry of woolly dogs.
(A) mtDNA tree of 207 dogs with A2b (Mutton) and A1a (SB Dog) haplotypes expanded. The map points correspond to colored tree tips for the most similar archaeological and historic dog mtDNAs, highlighting the subclades of interest and the broader haplotypes. Samples used are listed in data S1. (B) Outgroup-f₃ statistics (f₃(Gray Fox; Mutton, B)) or estimation of shared drift between Mutton and 229 other dogs revealed that Mutton has the highest similarity to PCDs. Black-point estimates indicate ancient genomes. (C) D-statistics (((PCD, Mutton), Test Dog), Gray Fox) consistent with gene flow into Mutton’s background, with European breeds appearing the most likely contributors to Mutton’s non-PCD ancestry. (D) f₄-ratio tests (f₄(A, Out; Mutton, AL3194-Port au Choix): f₄(A, Out; B, AL3194-Port au Choix)) to estimate the proportion of European settler-dog ancestry in Mutton’s background, performed by using six modern European breeds as proxies for Mutton’s European ancestry component.

Audrey T. Lin et al.
The history of Coast Salish “woolly dogs” revealed by ancient genomics and Indigenous Knowledge.
Science382,1303-1308(2023). DOI:10.1126/science.adi6549

Copyright © 2023 The Authors, some rights reserved;
exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. Reprinted with kind permission under licence #5691501362842.

Of course, there is really nothing surprising here because the vast majority of Earth's history, including the history of its people and their domestic animals took place mostly thousands if not millions or billions of years before 'Creation Week' when an earth that had existed for nearly 4 billion years was magicked into existence from nothing and people, who had evolved in Africa a million or so years earlier were magicked up out of dirt without ancestry somewhere in the Middle East, according to the childish counter-factual superstitions of Bible literalists.

And the same cultural chauvinism which believes Americans are a god's specially created people in a land specially created for them - which is behind the rejection of the TOE and the eager acceptance of the false dichotomy fallacy behind the 'God of the gaps' apologetic, was also behind the suppression of the Coast Salish peoples, their culture and with it their wooly dogs.

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