by Gregory McNamee
One hundred and fifty years ago last summer, two paleontologists, the French scientist Edouard Lartet and the Scottish explorer Hugh Falconer, were visiting one another at an archaeological dig in southwestern France.One or the other of them happened to notice that what were apparently bits of rubble that were about to be carted off and discarded were in fact pieces of ivory. And not just any ivory: the fragments made up a single piece of mammoth ivory carved with representations of the animal itself. It was the first proof that humans had lived alongside these giant creatures, and it gave rise to the archaeological designation of the Magdalenian era, a period that lasted from about 12,000 to 16,000 years ago.
Scholars had previously guessed that where human and mammoth remains lay together, they had been deposited by floods that jumbled great stretches of time. This guesswork is part of the process: Our understanding of prehistory is constantly being rewritten, and scientists are constantly revising it with new discoveries and techniques.
So it is with the history of the dog in the Americas. Some scholars have held that the dog predated the human arrival here, others that dogs traveled with those newcomers. Now, thanks to research conducted by a team of scholars from the University of Illinois and other institutions, it appears likely that dogs arrived in the Americas only about 10,000 years ago, later than humans did, perhaps part of a second or later wave of migration. What is more certain is the people who lived with them esteemed their dogs highly: at Cahokia, the famed mound settlement in Illinois that forms part of the study area, the ancient people buried their dogs ceremonially.