Burying dogs in ancient Cis-Baikal, Siberia: temporal trends and relationships with human diet and subsistence practices

PLoS One. 2013 May 17;8(5):e63740. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0063740. Print 2013.

Abstract

The first objective of this study is to examine temporal patterns in ancient dog burials in the Lake Baikal region of Eastern Siberia. The second objective is to determine if the practice of dog burial here can be correlated with patterns in human subsistence practices, in particular a reliance on terrestrial mammals. Direct radiocarbon dating of a suite of the region's dog remains indicates that these animals were given burial only during periods in which human burials were common. Dog burials of any kind were most common during the Early Neolithic (∼7-8000 B.P.), and rare during all other time periods. Further, only foraging groups seem to have buried canids in this region, as pastoralist habitation sites and cemeteries generally lack dog interments, with the exception of sacrificed animals. Stable carbon and nitrogen isotope data indicate that dogs were only buried where and when human diets were relatively rich in aquatic foods, which here most likely included river and lake fish and Baikal seal (Phoca sibirica). Generally, human and dog diets appear to have been similar across the study subregions, and this is important for interpreting their radiocarbon dates, and comparing them to those obtained on the region's human remains, both of which likely carry a freshwater old carbon bias. Slight offsets were observed in the isotope values of dogs and humans in our samples, particularly where both have diets rich in aquatic fauna. This may result from dietary differences between people and their dogs, perhaps due to consuming fish of different sizes, or even different tissues from the same aquatic fauna. This paper also provides a first glimpse of the DNA of ancient canids in Northeast Asia.

Publication types

  • Historical Article
  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Animals
  • Archaeology
  • Bone and Bones / anatomy & histology
  • Bone and Bones / chemistry
  • Burial* / history
  • Culture*
  • Diet*
  • Dogs
  • Geography
  • Haplotypes
  • History, Ancient
  • Humans
  • Molecular Sequence Data
  • Phylogeny
  • Radiometric Dating
  • Sequence Analysis, DNA
  • Siberia
  • Spatio-Temporal Analysis

Associated data

  • GENBANK/KC776175
  • GENBANK/KC776176
  • GENBANK/KC776177
  • GENBANK/KC776178
  • GENBANK/KC776179

Grants and funding

Funding for the data newly reported here was provided by a Standard Research Grant through the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (410-2008-0402) and through a MCRI grant (412-2011-1001) from this same granting agency (http://www.sshrc-crsh.gc.ca). Additional funding for this work was provided by an EFF-SAS grant from the Faculty of Arts, University of Alberta (http://www.foa.ualberta.ca). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.