Nearly 10,000 years ago, man's best friend provided protection and companionship — and an occasional meal.Eating dogs, though usually shunned in Western culture, is a practice round the world. Notably, various Antarctic expeditions have use dogs as edible snowmobiles. The Scott Expedition may well have failed for the lack of dogs to eat.
That's what researchers are saying after finding a bone fragment from what they are calling the earliest confirmed domesticated dog in the Americas.
University of Maine graduate student Samuel Belknap III came across the fragment while analyzing a dried-out sample of human waste unearthed in southwest Texas in the 1970s.
A carbon-dating test put the age of the bone at 9,400 years, and a DNA analysis confirmed it came from a dog — not a wolf, coyote or fox, Belknap said.
Because it was found deep inside a pile of human excrement and was the characteristic orange-brown color that bone turns when it has passed through the digestive tract, the fragment provides the earliest direct evidence that dogs — besides being used for company, security and hunting — were eaten by humans and may even have been bred as a food source, he said...
Wait a minute; Skye's giving me that funny look again...
I have always found it amusing that all of my kids feel free to play with, chase and wrestle with a carnivore that still out weighs one of them.
ReplyDeleteDogs, they are not for eating.
Ted