Author Topic: Just learned about the Dixie Dingo  (Read 3771 times)

littleman

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Just learned about the Dixie Dingo
« on: June 12, 2021, 05:31:29 AM »
Pretty interesting.  A breed of wild dogs that roam the South with DNA roots going back to Asia and are likely the descendants of dogs who crossed the land bridge with early Native Americans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolina_Dog

ergophobe

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Re: Just learned about the Dixie Dingo
« Reply #1 on: June 13, 2021, 05:22:34 PM »
Thanks. That's interesting. I didn't know about that at all and though I don't know dingos well, they're one of my favorite animals. Like coyotes, they just seem so intelligent and robust as animals. Very cool.

>>crossed the land bridge with early Native Americans

I was just listening to a podcast series on the people of America (in French, so I won't bother to link), but it seems that among scholars, the idea that all American Indians** crossed the land bridge 12,000 years ago is almost universally rejected. The evidence was always poor, but for a while a few influential scholars forced others to fit their evidence into that framework or be rejected. But for decades now, scholars have said that people came to the Americas much earlier than that.

Currently, they simply say that people arrived in the Americas sometime between 20,000 and 60,000 years ago, almost certainly in multiple waves and possibly by multiple modalities. Interesting debate.

**The local tribal councils have requested that, by preference, Indians be referred to by their tribal names when appropriate (i.e. when referring to one tribe), and by the collective "Indians" when referring to them as a group. Every time NPS posts something to Facebook using the terminology requested by the local tribal councils, there is a flurry of people calling them racist imperialists and demanding they use the "correct" term, "Native American," as specifically rejected by the local tribes because (as a tribal member explained to me), properly speaking, anyone born here is native to the Americas and, properly speaking, over a long enough timescale, everyone outside of East Africa is descended from immigrant stock.

littleman

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Re: Just learned about the Dixie Dingo
« Reply #2 on: June 13, 2021, 06:10:25 PM »
Thanks for the explanations.  I mainly used Native American instead of Indian to not confuse our members from other parts of the world.

Speaking of multiple wives, I remember a theory that one of the first groups to make it to the Americas were actually closely related to Aboriginal Australians.  They settled in Central America, but eventually moved to the Southern region of Argentina.  This goes some decades, and I am not sure if new DNA evidence supports or refutes the idea.

Brad

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Re: Just learned about the Dixie Dingo
« Reply #3 on: June 13, 2021, 06:13:15 PM »
> Dixie Dingo

I never gave this much thought but yes the Native Americans had dogs before the coming of Europeans to the New World, and those dogs probably survived along with their masters.  At least we have the DNA technology to trace that today.  Very cool.

> **

I remember during the Clinton years and the whole PC debate, somebody finally asked, "Where the Indians ever asked if they wanted to be referred to as "Native Americans"?  So some university did a study and found that 1. the native peoples were not asked, so the term Native American is something cooked up by white people (again), 2. when asked most native peoples at that time preferred to be known by their tribal and band names.  Of course, the PC crowd ignored this.

The last thing I read was the term Native American, was cooked up in the Bureau of Indian Affairs in either the late 1960's or early 1970's for some big policy report. 

ergophobe

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Re: Just learned about the Dixie Dingo
« Reply #4 on: June 14, 2021, 01:14:46 AM »
Thanks for the explanations.  I mainly used Native American

I didn't mean to divert or correct, mostly just lament that it's hard to even talk about sometimes because of nomenclature issues.

>>I remember a theory

It's interesting that a lot of theories are back on the table now and, given that scholars think there are multiple waves, one does not exclude another. So as I understood it, it's not off the table that Africans made it to the east coast of South America and Polynesians (who most certainly made it as far as Easter Island, albeit much later) might have landed in Chile.

And of course, people most certainly came across from Siberia at one point and, as Brad said, obvious once you say it, brought their dogs.

The interesting thing was that the scholars I was listening to being interviewed, both specialists on the topic, said that the one explanation that does not work is that people crossed a land bridge from Siberia 12,000 years ago. That doesn't match up with the glacial and sea level history. But for years and years, that was the prevailing opinion and whenever evidence of earlier settlement was found, the assertion was that the archaeologists who found it had incorrectly dated it.

ergophobe

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Re: Just learned about the Dixie Dingo
« Reply #5 on: June 16, 2021, 08:35:16 PM »
And then this pops up while catching up on my newsfeed

Humans may have set foot in North America way earlier than thought
https://www.futurity.org/early-humans-bones-archaeology-mexico-2575302-2/