Does Dog Folklore of Native American Peoples Leave Clues About Migratory Paths from Asia?

It is now generally accepted that the dogs of the native peoples of the Americas were descended from Eurasian wolves, not from North American wolves, which means that dogs came across the land connection between Asia and Alaska at the same time as humans migrated to the Americas. This leads to other questions. What was the relationship between these two migrating species? What did the dogs do for men? Absent some lucky archeological find, one would assume that these questions might never be answered. Yet some answers may came from the mythologies of the world. Yuri Berezkin, in a paper entitled “‘The Black Dog at the River of Tears’: Some Amerindian Representations of the Passage to the Land of the Dead and their Eurasian Roots,” Forum for Anthropology and Culture (2005), finds that ancient mythologies might span the land bridge and might indeed say something about the relationship of men and dogs when that bridge was being crossed.

New World sites date back 11,500, perhaps 12,000 years, in what is geologically the Terminal Pleistocene, when people in the Far East had begun to manufacture ceramics. The peoples migrating to the New World were comprised of several groups, and probably brought several cultures with them. Finding different strands of folkloric motifs among these groups would seem impossible, but Berezkin argues that it can be done by combining ethnographic material with statistical methods. Berezkin looked at eight particular folkloric motifs involving dogs, and then determined which ancient mythologies, European, Asian, and American, included the motif. The motifs and the regions where they are found (latter in italics), in one form or another, are:

1. Dog helps the soul reach the realm of the dead or makes existence there easier. Rigveda, Zoroastrians, Far East, Alaskan tribes, Latin America
2. Dog ferries deceased across a river. Latin America
3. Condition for receiving help from a dog to gain access to the next world or to avoid punishment there is having treated dogs well in one’s lifetime. Zoroastrians, Southern Siberia, Alaskan tribes, Midwestern/Eastern North America, Latin America
4. Dog is the master, an inhabitant, or a guardian of the other world. Egypt, Rigveda, Zoroastrians, Finns, Southern Siberia, Alaskan tribes, Midwestern/Eastern North America, Latin America
5. Subject has to win dog over with food or possess the appropriate weapon to defend himself from the dog in order to be let through or helped by the dog. Southern Siberia, one Alaskan tribe, Midwestern/Eastern North America, Latin America
6. Otherworldly dog lives on Milky Way and is associated with it. Southern Siberia, one Alaskan tribe, Midwestern/Eastern North America
7. Dogs have special places in or paths leading to the next world. Southern Siberia, Alaskan tribes, Midwestern/Eastern North America
8. In the land of the dead or on the path to it, there are rivers or lakes of tears, blood, pus, etc. Kashmir, Turks, Armenians, Southern Siberia, Far East, Alaskan tribes, American Southwest, Latin America

I have simplified the data, probably to the point of inaccuracy, but to indicate how certain motifs exist in the folklores of both the Old and New Worlds. Many of the cases of myths that exist in both Eurasia and the Americas do not give rise to specific connections in Berezkin’s analysis. He does, however, suggest that dogs may have been useful in dragging loads for the peoples migrating to the New World:

"It is possible that it is precisely the presence of dogs, who were able to drag heavy loads as well as serve as a source of live meat, that enabled man to conquer the intracontinental regions of North-Eastern Asia and Beringia, and then allowed his migration southwards along the Mackenzie Corridor between the Laurentide and the Cordilleran ice sheets …. The dog could hardly have been as important to the inhabitants of coastal areas. Consequently, it is more likely that the dog reached America along intra-continental routes (along the valleys of the rivers Yukon and Mackenzie) than along coastal ones (through Southern Alaska). This hypothesis matches the distribution of the above folkloric motifs, which, beyond Alaska, are present in the east of North America but not the west."

Deliberate burials of dogs date as far back as 8,500 years ago in North America, but all burials before the first millennium BC are found and the Midwest and Eastern U.S. and Canada. The argument is that the native Americans of the eastern U.S. used dogs for transportation because they descended from groups that moved inland after crossing the land bridge, not on the Alaskan coast. Because of this, these people valued their dogs highly and honored them with burials. Only much later did this practice spread to the other New World peoples, and probably because of the spread of agricultural techniques.