How old Is the Maltese, really?
“The tiny Maltese,” the American Kennel Club tells us, “has been sitting in the lap of luxury since the Bible was a work in progress.”
This is also the opinion of my friend the Maltese owner (the dog is also my friend), who recently invoked the Greeks and the Romans as early admirers of the breed.
I have these conversations on occasion with people who are devoted to one breed or another, and I usually nod and say, well, maybe, sort of. True, Aristotle did praise the proportions of a kind of lap dog described as a Melitaean dog. Scholars debate whether this meant the dog came from Malta, or another island called Melite or Miljet, or maybe a town in Sicily. It was a long time ago, after all. Aristotle also compared the dog to a marten, a member of the weasel family, perhaps because of its size. And yes, the Romans absolutely loved these dogs.
So there is little doubt that there were little white lap dogs 2,000 years ago. The question is whether the modern Maltese breed is directly descended from the pets Romans scratched behind the ears.
It’s not just Maltese fanciers who are interested in their breed’s ancient roots. Basenjis, Pomeranians, Samoyeds, Salukis, terriers and others have supporters who want to trace the breeds back to ancient times. But the Maltese seemed a good dog to discuss because the historical record is so rich. Obviously the Maltese is an ancient breed. Right?
Is Maltese breed ancient?
I brought this question to several of the scientists I turn to when I have dog DNA questions. Is the modern Maltese breed, in fact, ancient? The scientists, you will be shocked to learn, said no. But, as with anything involving dogs and science, it’s complicated.
A couple of points to set the stage. All dogs are descended from the first dogs, just as all humans can trace their ancestry to the first Homo sapiens. None of us, or our dogs, have a more ancient ancestry than any other. What people seem to want to know is whether those ancestors were mutts or nobles, William the Conqueror
or one of the conquered, a dog on a lap who got into a portrait, or a dog on the street who got into trouble.
I’m not looking at this from the outside, by the way. I have been there myself, digging as deep as I could into the long and honorable history of my cairn terriers and Pomeranians. I have also tried to trace my family’s O’Connors and O’Learys and Fallons and Goritzes. (I haven’t found any conquerors yet.) But the idea of valuing genetic purity feels creepy sometimes, even if it is in animals who like to roll in cow pies when they get the chance.
Elaine Ostrander, a dog genomics specialist at the National Institutes of Health, has gone as deep into breed differences and history as any scientist. She said the hunger for old breed ancestry is similar to the desire to reach back to the Mayflower for human antecedents. “We think that way about ourselves. So we think that way about our dogs.”
“The pharaoh hound people were the first to approach me and ask that question,” she recalled.
“Do our dogs really date back to the time of the pharaoh?” the breeders asked. Unfortunately not. That breed, Ostrander said, was “totally recreated by mixing and matching existing breeds” after World War II.
2,000-year-old concept of a breed
Other breeds were established by picking an existing group of dogs in the Victorian era and classifying them as a breed with a definition that meant only dogs whose names were in a registry or whose ancestors could be identified as being in that registry, fit the breed. And 2,000 years ago, she said, “the concept of a breed did not exist.”
Nor does DNA show any direct line from ancient to modern Maltese. To understand what dog DNA research is all about, it’s worth taking a step back. The genetic markers that Ostrander and other researchers use in genome comparisons to identify breeds are mostly not the genes that contain the recipe for floppy ears or bent legs or a certain color coat.
They are not seeking a genetic recipe for a basset hound or beagle, but a way to see how closely related one is to the other. Most DNA in humans and dogs has no known function. Only a portion of a genome makes up actual genes. And repetitive stretches of DNA of unknown purpose, if any, have proved to be useful in comparing groups and individuals. They change more from generation to generation and so offer more variation for scientists to work with in comparing breeds. What researchers develop is a breed fingerprint, but not a blueprint.
Neither Ostrander nor Heidi Parker, a colleague and collaborator at NIH, gave a firm answer on how far back a breed could be traced, but they agreed that it basically depended on how long a breed club had been keeping records, not on what’s in a dog’s DNA. Before that time, breeding was not so regulated.
The genomes of the Maltese, the Havanese, the bichon and the Bolognese (the dog not the sauce) are all related, Parker said. The breeds may have split from a common ancestor a few hundred years ago and that common ancestor may no longer exist, or it might have been closer to one of the breeds than the others. But there’s no DNA line to be traced to the time of Aristotle.