Famine forced Jamestown settlers to eat native dogs, DNA shows
This article is part of our special Pets section, about scientists’ growing interest in our companion animals.
For 30 years, archaeologists have been digging at Jamestown, the first permanent British settlement in America. trumpets, children’s shoes, pistols and millions of other unearthed artifacts have provided new clues about what life was like inside the fort that colonists built on Virginia’s James River in 1607.
Some of the most intriguing clues come from bones—not from the people who lived in Jamestown, but from the dogs.
The earliest written accounts of European colonists make only passing references to dogs. Spanish and British explorers brought mastiffs, bloodhounds, and water spaniels to the New World, though probably not as pets. Some European dogs helped hunt deer and birds, while others were sent into battle: when Powhatan forces attacked Jamestown, English soldiers retaliated by unleashing dogs on Powhatan villages.
The data also shows that dogs sometimes served as food. When the Powhatan people besieged the settlement in 1609, the British residents suffered a winter that became known as “the Starvation Time.” The people trapped in Jamestown resorted to eating dogs.
“Having fed upon horses and other beasts while they lasted, we were glad to deal with vermin, such as dogs, cats, and mice,” wrote George Percy, the chairman of the council of Jamestown, in 1622.
In the early 2000s, archaeologists confirmed these reports with the discovery of the bones of at least 16 dogs at Jamestown. The dogs had been buried in pits, cellars and a bakery. Archaeologists discovered cut marks on the bones where knives had been used to slice off the muscles. “Those butcher marks on the dog bones were immediately obvious to us,” said Leah Stricker, curator of Jamestown Rediscovery, the archaeological project excavating artifacts from the settlement.
After preliminary inspection, the dog bones were stored at the Jamestown Museum. In 2019, Ariane Thomas, then a graduate student at the University of Iowa, contacted the museum. She wanted to search the bones for DNA.
After being buried in Jamestown soil for four centuries, the dog remains had lost most of their genetic material. Yet Dr. succeeded. Thomas managed to extract a significant amount of DNA from six bones. It came from structures in cells known as mitochondria, which are only inherited from mothers. The mitochondrial DNA, Dr. hoped. Thomas, would link the maternal origins of the dogs to a specific breed.
The Jamestown researchers assumed that the dogs would belong to breeds from England. “And it took a wild turn,” says Michael Lavin, curator at Jamestown Rediscovery.
The DNA showed that the dogs were not European, but earlier Native American Breeds.
When the ancestors of the Native Americans traveled from Siberia to America, they brought dogs with them. Archaeologists have found dog remains in Canada that date back to the time more than 13,000 years. Native Americans likely used early breeds for hunting and transporting goods. A tribe in the Pacific Northwest even bred dogs with woolly hair which they harvested for textiles. Archaeologists have also found dog remains in burial sites, including one in Virginia, which may reflect the spiritual importance they had to humans.
Remains of an early American dog have been found DNA delivered. Those breeds have largely disappeared and no trace of their legacy can be found in living dogs in North America today. But it’s also not clear when — or how — the ancient American dogs disappeared. “I wanted to establish that time frame,” said Dr. Thomas.
Dr. Thomas’ analysis revealed that Native American dog breeds lived within the heavily fortified walls of Jamestown. And while some of the animals died during the famine, Dr. Thomas and her colleagues discovered that other dogs lived before or after the famine, spanning the period from 1607 to 1617.
For Dr. Thomas suggests two possibilities for the discovery. One is that the dogs belonged to Powhatan women who married English men and moved in. The same building where some dog bones were discovered also contained Powhatan pipes, bone needles and beads.
Alternatively, the native dogs could have been allowed to roam freely in and out of the settlement, she said. While Jamestown’s high fortification walls may have been intended to keep Powhatan troops out, they may not have been much of a barrier to dogs.
Dr. Thomas speculated that crop failures and wars with the surrounding Powhatan people may have meant that Jamestown residents did not have time to keep some dogs inside the settlement and other dogs outside.
“It seems like there were a lot of other priorities,” Dr. Thomas said. “And so inevitably dogs were low on the priority list.”
