Reading: Jennifer Raff, Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas (Twelve, Hachette Book Group: 2022)
It is time once again to teach my undergrad survey on World History to 1500, which means it is time once again to think about revising my lectures and staying vaguely up-to-date with the scholarship. (The eternal, never-ending, Sisyphean labor of teaching slightly outside your own field of expertise.) To that end, I’m reading Jennifer Raff’s book on DNA and the earliest migrations of people into the Americas, which successfully threads the needle of “science writing for a non-specialist audience.” I enjoyed the surprise appearance of dogs in the narrative. (NB: “Beringian Standstill” refers to the apparently extended isolation of the peoples who settled along central Beringia when it was still above water.)
In recent years, we have been able to get insights into human history from an unexpected source: the genomes of dogs… [Angela] Perri and her colleagues have suggested that the Beringian Standstill provided the ideal conditions needed for the domestication of dogs: an environment that favored close associations with humans for access to scarce food resources, isolation from other canid groups, and clear evidence of genetic adaptations for Arctic conditions in parallel with human adaptations. This intriguing hypothesis matches the timing for the emergence of domesticated dogs somewhere between 40,000 and 15,000 years ago (an admittedly wide range of time). [198, 200]