Hokkaido Island dogs and human diets 1500 YBP

Hokkaido Island dog today

One of the disadvantages of keeping dogs is their requirement for a high protein diet, placing them in competition with humans. On the other hand if dogs and humans are eating the same things it would suggest a reason for them to come together when food was plentiful. Feeding dogs would give the dogs a reason to follow hunters, and cooperate with humans.

In a forthcoming paper Tsutaya et al. (in press 2014) analyze carbon and nitrogen isotopes from human and dog remains from the Moyore site on eastern Hokkaido Island, Japan. The Moyoro archeological site is located on an estuarine sand area of the Abashiri River and is representative of the shell mounds of the Okhotsk culture. The site has been excavated several times during the 20th century and contains human burials and the remains of pit dwellings. Radiocarbon and palaeomagnetic dating suggest the site was used 1500 YBP.

The isotopic data shows the dogs were predominantly feeding on brackish-water fish, marine fish, and marine mammals (5-45%). The presence of marine mammals in the dog’s diet suggests that humans were feeding the dogs.

The δ13C and δ15N values of adult human bone collagen found terrestrial food sources provided less than 16% of the diet and that the Moyoro human population depended heavily on marine mammals for dietary protein. Marine mammals made up 80-90% of the Moyoro human diet. Thus, there was no significant overlap in the diet of the dog and the human population.

Ethnographic studies of the late 19th and early 20th century reported on dog use and dog diet of the indigenous Ainu people in Hokkaido and Sakhalin, and fishers in Kamchatka. Ethnographic accounts of the Ainu population in Hokkaido and Sakhalin reported dogs were used for hunting terrestrial mammals and sledging. Dog skins were used to make clothes and shoes. The Ainu people fed their dogs with low-sodium trout and the isotope ratio of trout in Hokkaido is similar to that of brackish-water fish. Fishers in Kamchatka in the late nineteenth century fed their domesticated dogs with dried or fermented fish and used them to pull sledges. Although the cultural traits reported in modern ethnographic studies are not directly comparable with those in the ancient Okhotsk population, such ethnographic observations agree well with the isotopic results in the Tsutaya et al. (2014) study.

Citation

Tsutaya T, Naito YI, Ishida H, and Yoneda M. (in press 2014). Carbon and nitrogen isotope analyses of human and dog diet in the Okhotsk culture: perspectives from the Moyoro site, Japan. Anthropological Science.