Early Texans had Good Taste in Dogs

Roasted or fried.

Nearly 10,000 years ago, man's best friend provided protection and companionship — and an occasional meal.

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...

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.

Wait a minute; Skye's giving me that funny look again...