![]() However, in spite of the various capacities of dogs, few are perceivable in archaeological evidence, thus often remaining ambiguous ( Lupo, 2011). ![]() Historical records revealed that dogs participated in every aspect of human societies, helping in hunting, waste disposal, protection of people and belongings, guarding, entertainment, sacrifice, and offering ( Vigne and Guilaine, 2004 Digard, 2006 Méniel, 2006 Horard-Herbin et al., 2014). On the other hand, high concentrations of pollen from forest and grassland revealed that hunting dogs played a regular role in the early millet-rice mixed farming societies, probably related to the importance of hunting activities in the daily subsistence.Īs the first domestic animal, current archaeological and genetic evidence suggest that dogs emerged during the Late Pleistocene ( Germonpré et al., 2009, Germonpre et al., 2012 Ovodov et al., 2011 Larson et al., 2012). Dogs at Tianluoshan mostly appeared in the rice field area, in correspondence with the labor-consuming rice cultivation as the main targeted resource, showing their participation in daily agricultural activities. Furthermore, activity areas of the dogs also reflect different deployment strategies and agricultural systems, evidenced by pollen spectra from the coprolites. It most probably referred to their assistance in hunting and thus being provisioned with meat. On the contrary, dogs from the sites of Shuangdun, Yuhuicun, and Houtieying showed a meat-dominated diet with higher proportions of animal sterols and short-chain fatty alcohols. Dogs may have lived on foraging or been provisioned with refuse for the cleanness purpose. The Tianluoshan dogs showed a plant-dominated diet with higher contents of plant sterols and fatty alcohols with longer chain lengths. In the present study, dog coprolites, uncovered from two groups of early agricultural societies in China during the Neolithic Age, the early rice agricultural site of Tianluoshan in the lower Yangtze River, and three early millet-rice mixed agricultural sites of Shuangdun, Yuhuicun, and Houtieying along the middle Huai River, were examined based on the comparisons of lipid and palynological results to reveal different relationships of dogs and humans. However, the associations between dogs and early farmers are not readily visible in the archaeological record. After their domestication in Paleolithic hunter-gatherer societies, the emergence of agriculture shifted their partnerships with people. 4Institute of Archaeology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, Chinaĭogs served in a variety of capacities in prehistory.3Zhejiang Provincial Institute of Relics and Archaeology, Hangzhou, China.2Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.1School of Archaeology and Museology, Peking University, Beijing, China.Yunan Zhang 1,2*, Guoping Sun 3, Dong Zhang 4, Xiaoyan Yang 2 and Xiaohong Wu 1*
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