Ma¯ori dogs on earliest voyages
Will Harvie
New research into the earliest dogs to arrive in Aotearoa shows a surprising lack of genetic diversity but might lead one day to the dog Hawaiki. reports.
Kur¯ı bred with waves of incoming European dogs brought by early whalers and sealers and later by European colonists.
As a PhD student, Karen Greig made her way through archaeological collections around New Zealand, looking for the teeth of the earliest dogs to arrive in Aotearoa.
She got access to 14 teeth excavated from a Polynesian oven at Wairau Bar, near Blenheim. She also located teeth from three archaeological sites in Otago and one site near Houhora Harbour in the Far North. For comparison, she also sampled two teeth from Aitutaki in the Cook Islands.
Greig was after kurı¯ teeth because many retain enough DNA for analysis using the latest, finegrained genetic techniques. These promised to tell us new things about these early dogs – and perhaps their human masters.
Her analyses showed a ‘‘striking lack of mitochondrial genetic diversity’’ in kurı¯, as these dogs are known in Ma¯ ori.
‘‘Our analysis shows that a group of closely related dogs were brought to New Zealand, probably from an East Polynesian source population, and that these dogs and their offspring were widely dispersed throughout the country during the [Ma¯ ori] colonisation process,’’ wrote Greig.
Greig is the director of Southern Pacific Archaeological Research at the University of Otago. She published a first paper on the subject in 2015 and a second chapter last month. It replicates and expands on the findings of the first.
Previous research suggests Pacific dogs originated in East Asia and made their way to what’s today Papua New Guinea. Polynesians seem to have picked them up there and taken them to the South Pacific starting about 3500 years ago.
New Zealand was the end of the chain of migrations and low dog diversity here suggested several possibilities to Greig.
In one scenario, people gradually moved to new islands and took ‘‘subsets’’ of dogs with them. ‘‘This group [of dogs] would not possess the same range of genetic lineages as the homeland population,’’ Greig wrote in an email. As more islands were found, smaller subsets of dogs were taken to them. Over time, genetic diversity decreased.
In another scenario, the reduction of genetic diversity happened much faster. There may have been a ‘‘few critical events’’ that meant only a few dogs made it to the new islands, resulting in sharp and quick drops in genetic diversity, she wrote.
Whatever happened, by the time Polynesians reached Aotearoa in about 1300AD, genetic diversity had narrowed considerably.
The thesis is supported by Greig’s analysis of the Cook Island dog teeth. Those two teeth show greater diversity than the New Zealand dogs.
The poor diversity found in kurı¯ contrasts with the relatively high diversity found in Polynesian rats (kiore) and human remains found in Aotearoa.
‘‘Molecular genetic analyses of mtDNA variation in modern kiore populations has shown that the lineages observed in New Zealand populations are highly divergent, indicating that there were multiple introductions’’, reports Greig based on others’ research.
These Pacific rats were probably stowaways on waka travelling over much of Polynesia over a long time.
Meanwhile, analysis of four human remains from Wairau Bar showed they were not closely related. Moreover stable isotope analysis showed they had different diets and childhood residences outside of Aotearoa.
They were probably among the first generation of Polynesians to arrive here and they came from a ‘‘number of different communities ... that spanned several islands or archipelagoes’’, Greig writes in the second paper.
In other words, the idea that Maori originated from a single place called Hawaiki is not the current scientific thinking. Rather researchers have been talking about the ‘‘Hawaiki Zone’’ from some years.
It’s thought to be in central-east Polynesia and include the Cook Islands and French Polynesia.
Greig’s kurı¯ research supports the proposal.
It’s possible further research could locate the dog Hawaiki, Greig said in an interview. It’s unlikely to be one island, she said, but it’s probably within the zone.
Kurı¯ are sometimes described as extinct, but Greig said that wasn’t quite right. Rather kurı¯ bred with waves of incoming European dogs brought by early whalers and sealers and later by European colonists.
Kurı¯ were overwhelmed and ‘‘subsumed’’ by these euro dogs and effectively disappeared. But kurı¯ lineages probably still exist within New Zealand dogs, she said.
Finding them would be ‘‘needle in the haystack’’ and probably not possible with current techniques and technologies. Still, it’s an intriguing idea for future scientists.
Meanwhile, there are plenty more kurı¯ teeth in New Zealand and the Pacific Islands, Greig said in the interview. She plans to continue the research and hopes one day to use nuclear DNA techniques to look for traits – hair colour, hair length, size and the like.
That might tell us if Polynesians and later Maori were selectively breeding kurı¯.