New Research Reveals That the First Permanent English Settlers in North America Ate Dogs

 Researchers discovered that six dogs from the Virginia Company Period in Jamestown—the first permanent English settlement in North America—possessed Indigenous ancestry and were eaten by the settlers.

New research reveals that during a period of starvation at Jamestown, the first English settlement in North America in the 17th century, dogs with Indigenous ancestry were eaten. The study was published on May 22 in American Antiquity by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for American Archaeology. This discovery changes historians’ understanding of how Indigenous communities negotiated their relationship with rising colonial powers during this period. It also suggests that early European colonists depended on local Indigenous communities for their very survival, especially during the initial settlement period. Researchers analyzed ancient mitochondrial DNA from archaeological dogs from Jamestown from the period AD 1609 – 1617. At least six of the Jamestown dogs that were analyzed had unambiguous evidence of Native American ancestry. These dogs shared mitogenomic similarities with Hopewellian, Mississippian, and Late Woodland period dogs from...Read more...Read more...

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