Hunting with dogs: a synthesis of ethnohistorical data and discussion of their implications for prehistoric subsistence in New Guinea

Abstract

The advent of the dog is widely recognised as a major development in the economic organisation of ancient and contemporary hunter-gatherer and agricultural societies. Although the utility of dogs in assisting recent historical and contemporary New Guinean hunters is commonly emphasised in anthropological discourse, to date there has been no critical evaluation of their actual contributions to hunting yields and nutrition. As a result, it remains unclear what significance the advent of hunting dogs is likely to have had for prehistoric economies in New Guinea. Here we present a comprehensive synthesis and review of the evidence for the use of dogs in hunting within New Guinea, focusing on the ways in which they assist; what kinds of game they help to capture; the degree to which they improve hunting yields and efficiency; and how this affects the taxonomic makeup and average body-size of game in human diets. We then apply the findings to a consideration of how dogs likely affected the prehistoric economies of New Guinea after their introduction in the Late Holocene. As reliance on hunting dogs tends to produce over-representation of a few mammal species within hunting yields, we identify potential zooarchaeological signatures for the use of dogs, and discuss excavated sites at which these may be visible. Dogs have a transformative effect on the outcomes of hunting in New Guinea's environments, and their novel use likely marked a significant development in the island's economies which has previously been underestimated.