Robert J. Losey

• Ph.D.
• Professor (Full) at University of Alberta

Sled dogs are among the most iconic animals of the North, and their efforts in pulling sleds facilitated trade and subsistence practices that sustained many Indigenous groups for thousands of years. Unfortunately, the history of dog sledding is difficult to trace in archaeology. The identification of dog sledding in the past has been mostly address...

Age-related patterns in cranial suture and synchondrosis obliteration in 371 known-age North American grey wolves (Canis lupus) are examined to assess their utility in estimating the age of archaeological and paleontological wolf crania. Differences in age-related obliteration patterns between these wolves and 576 known-age domestic dogs (Canis fam...

Dental age estimation based on tooth eruption schedules and wear is a useful analytical tool in zooarchaeology for developing demographic profiles for animal skeletal remains, particularly those from ruminants. While tooth eruption schedules are applicable only to younger individuals, tooth wear can be used for older animals as the heights of thei...

People, wolves, and dogs have interacted in various ways for millennia, but most aspects of these relationships remain poorly understood. Understanding canid age at death can provide insights into these relationships and how they vary geographically, temporally, and by species. Existing methods for ageing canids are limited, highlighting a need for...

Most of the fundamental methods for analyzing archaeological dog remains need to be better developed. This is particularly true for methods designed to estimate age at death. Most ageing methods are either destructive and specialized or useful only for identifying juveniles. Cranial suture closure and obliteration patterning are commonly examined t...

The Iamal-Nenets region of Siberia is one of many Arctic areas where women's sewing skills were and are crucial to daily existence. Our article explores archaeological needles and needle cases that were made and used by ancestors of the current Indigenous peoples of this region. We frame our examination of these materials through a discussion of wo...

Age estimation is crucial for investigating animal populations in the past and present. Visual examination of tooth wear and eruption is one of the most common ageing methods in zooarchaeology, wildlife management, palaeontology, and veterinary research. Such approaches are particularly advantageous because they are non-destructive, can be complete...

Baikal seals (Pusa sibirica) are a unique freshwater pinniped that inhabits Lake Baikal in the interior of Eastern Siberia. These seals were critical resources for human groups living along the lake through at least the Holocene. This study develops osteometric methods for assessing Baikal seal body size, including body mass and nose-tail length. T...

Indigenous communities on the Northern Great Plains of North America commonly kept dogs as domestic animals. Historical records and previous archaeological research indicate that many of these dogs were large-bodied animals. Both data sources also suggest that wolf-dog interbreeding was common and in part occurred as a means of producing large dogs...

Research on the evolution of dog foraging and diet has largely focused on scavenging during their initial domestication and genetic adaptations to starch-rich food environments following the advent of agriculture. The Siberian archaeological record evidences other critical shifts in dog foraging and diet that likely characterize Holocene dogs globa...

Indigenous communities living in the Iamal-Nenets region of the Arctic Siberia incorporate reindeer antlers into various aspects of their lives, at times in remarkable ways. This is especially the case for Nenets herding families, who closely interact with domestic reindeer on a daily basis. Antlers for Nenets are not just raw materials for produci...

Идентификация рабочих животных является одним из наиболее перспективных направлений в зооархео-логических исследованиях. Начиная с 1990-х годов, несколько исследователей пытались разработать методы и приемы, позволяющие выделить тягловых, верховых и ездовых животных по археологическим данным. В этой статье мы обобщаем три основных метода, или индик...

Domestication is often portrayed as a long-past event, at times even in archaeological literature. The term domestication is also now applied to other processes, including human evolution. In such contexts, domestication means selection for friendliness or prosociality and the bodily results of such selective choices. Both such perspectives are mis...

This study focuses on constructing a demographic profile for a large set of reindeer (Rangifer tarandus) remains from the Iron Age Iarte VI site on the Iamal Peninsula in Siberia. Iarte VI produced one of the largest reindeer assemblages in the entire Arctic, totalling ∼22,000 specimens. Age assessment is conducted by examining teeth eruption seque...

Dogs have been essential to life in the Siberian Arctic for over 9,500 y, and this tight link between people and dogs continues in Siberian communities. Although Arctic Siberian groups such as the Nenets received limited gene flow from neighboring groups, archaeological evidence suggests that metallurgy and new subsistence strategies emerged in Nor...

Elk are common in forager archaeological artwork of northern Eurasia. During the Middle Holocene, the peoples of Cis-Baikal produced numerous elk depictions in rock art and mobiliary items. Most of the rock art has now been destroyed. However, Cis-Baikal’s cemeteries and habitation sites are increasingly well documented, with the former generating...

The study of reindeer domestication provides a unique opportunity to examine how domestication involves more than bodily changes in animals produced through selection. Domestication requires enskilment among humans and animals, and this process of pragmatic learning is dependent on specific forms of material culture. Particularly with the domestica...

Analysis of individual animal bodies can provide numerous useful insights in archeology, including how humans provisioned such animals, which in turn informs on a variety of other past behaviors such as human dietary patterns. In this study, we conducted stable carbon (δ 13 C) and nitrogen (δ 15 N) isotope analysis of collagen and keratin from four...

Dogs were the first domestic animal, but little is known about their population history and to what extent it was linked to humans. We sequenced 27 ancient dog genomes and found that all dogs share a common ancestry distinct from present-day wolves, with limited gene flow from wolves since domestication but substantial dog-to-wolf gene flow. By 11,...

Dog domestication was multifaceted Dogs were the first domesticated animal, likely originating from human-associated wolves, but their origin remains unclear. Bergstrom et al. sequenced 27 ancient dog genomes from multiple locations near to and corresponding in time to comparable human ancient DNA sites (see the Perspective by Pavlidis and Somel)....

The history of reindeer domestication is a critical topic in the study of human-animal relationships across Northern Eurasia. The Iamal-Nenets region of Arctic Siberia, now a global center of the reindeer pastoralism, has been the subject of much recent research on reindeer domestication. However, tracking the beginnings of reindeer domestication i...

This study describes a non-destructive method that can be used to estimate the age of archaeological dog remains involving tooth pulp cavity closure ratios. This technique was first developed in wildlife management and zoology for wild carnivores. For the first time, we develop this technique for dogs by utilizing a modern sample of 751 teeth roots...

Despite widespread attention to the recent past as an archaeological topic, few archaeologists have attended to the particular social and ecological stakes of one of the most defining material features of contemporary life: the long-term effects of toxic industrial waste. Identifying the present era as the high Capitalocene, this article highlights...

Just as the domestication of livestock is often cited as a key element in the Neolithic transition to settled, the emergence of large‐scaled reindeer husbandry was a fundamental social transformation for the indigenous peoples of Arctic Eurasia. To better understand the history of reindeer domestication, and the genetic processes associated with th...

The study of our long-term relationships with dogs faces many theoretical and methodological challenges. Recent changes in social sciences provide profound new insights on how dogs and humans share their lives. Animals are no longer mere background in stories of human history. Rather, dogs and other animals are critical elements in the assemblages...

Reindeer scapulae are widely incorporated into Indigenous lifeways across the Circumpolar North, especially as hide working tools, fish knives, and divination devices. This article addresses the histories of this particular skeletal element at the Iron Age settlement site of Iarte VI on the Iamal Peninsula, Arctic Siberia. Scapula tools are the mos...

Learning to use atlatls: equipment scaling and enskilment on the Oregon Coast - Volume 93 Issue 372 - Robert J. Losey, Emily Hull

Domestic dogs have been central to life in the North American Arctic for millennia. The ancestors of the Inuit were the first to introduce the widespread usage of dog sledge transportation technology to the Americas, but whether the Inuit adopted local Palaeo-Inuit dogs or introduced a new dog population to the region remains unknown. To test these...

Domestic dogs have been central to life in the North American Arctic for millennia. The ancestors of the Inuit were the first to introduce the widespread usage of dog sledge transportation technology to the Americas, but whether the Inuit adopted local Palaeo-Inuit dogs or introduced a new dog population to the region remains unknown. To test these...

Domestic dogs have been central to life in the North American Arctic for millennia. The ancestors of the Inuit were the first to introduce the widespread usage of dog sledge transportation technology to the Americas, but whether the Inuit adopted local Palaeo-Inuit dogs or introduced a new dog population to the region remains unknown. To test these...

Over the past several decades archaeologists have used the spinal pathology spondylosis deformans as an indicator that archaeological dogs were used to pull or carry loads. This interpretive approach is largely based upon observations of prehistoric dog remains and archaeologist’s interpretations of veterinary literature on recent sled dogs and oth...

Frequency of osteophyte grades in non-transport dog age groups by a) percentage of assessed endplates affected, b) relative frequency of affected endplates by grade. (DOCX)

Severity of spondylosis deformans in sled dogs by percentage of endplates affected. (TIF)

Severity of spondylosis deformans in wolves by percentage of endplates affected. (TIF)

Distribution of osteophyte grades in all affected endplates for sled dog age groups. (TIF)

Dog breeds assessed. (DOCX)

Wolf life history data. (XLSX)

Frequency of osteophyte grades in sled dog age groups by a) percentage of assessed endplates affected, b) relative frequency of affected endplates by grade. (DOCX)

Frequency of osteophyte grades in wolf age groups by a) percentage of assessed endplates affected, b) relative frequency of affected endplates by grade. (DOCX)

Distribution of osteophyte grades in all affected endplates for non-transport dog age groups. (TIF)

Distribution of osteophyte grades in all assessed endplates for sled dog age groups. (TIF)

Distribution of osteophyte grades in all assessed endplates for wolf age groups. (TIF)

Distribution of osteophyte grades in all affected endplates for wolf age groups. (TIF)

Severity of spondylosis deformans in non-transport dogs by percentage of endplates affected. (TIF)

Distribution of osteophyte grades in all assessed endplates for non-transport dog age groups. (TIF)

In this paper, we report the stable carbon and nitrogen isotope analysis results of wild (n=15) and domestic (n=21) animal samples from the Proezzhaia I site, a fortified Medieval settlement in Trans-Baikal, Siberia. Additionally, we analyzed five modern freshwater fish samples from the Shilka River, which flows immediately north of the site. Toget...

Archaeological materials in museum collections provide an excellent opportunity for researchers to investigate social, cultural, and environmental change. However, the precision of the archaeological analysis and interpretation is dependent on a firm understanding of the site chronology. The Par-Tee site (35CLT20), located on the northern Oregon Co...

Domestication has particular salience in archaeology, and numerous recent theoretical papers describe this process as a set of evolutionary, ongoing, social, and material relationships between humans and select other species. In contrast, analytical papers on the domestication of dogs nearly always involve a search for their origins as marked by ch...

Dogs in the North offers an interdisciplinary in-depth consideration of the multiple roles that dogs have played in the North. Spanning the deep history of humans and dogs in the North, the volume examines a variety of contexts in North America and Eurasia. The case studies build on archaeological , ethnohistorical, ethnographic, and anthropologica...

Rangifer tarandus is one of the most important animals for indigenous groups living in the Arctic. This significance is particularly the case in the Iamal Peninsula of the Russian Federation. The Iamal Peninsula has produced a substantial archaeological record of human engagement with reindeer during the Late Holocene period. The archaeological sit...

Trans-Baikal, the interior region just to the east of Siberia's Lake Baikal, has a fairly extensive but largely unstudied archaeological record of human interaction with domestic dogs. This region's archaeological dog remains are documented for the first time in this paper. New radiocarbon dates indicate that dogs first appear in this region by at...

Much of the fossil record for dogs consists of mandibles. However, can fossil canid mandibles be reliably identified as dogs or wolves? 3D geometric morphometric analysis correctly classifies 99.5% of the modern dog and wolf mandibles. However, only 4 of 26 Ust'-Polui fossil mandibles, a Russian Arctic site occupied from 250BCE to 150CE, were ident...

Předmostí is one of the most famous Gravettian sites in Central Europe. Its fame is based on a unique human assemblage, sadly largely destroyed during the Second World War, a huge mammoth assemblage and a very rich large canid assemblage. It has been shown previously that mammoth played an important role in the subsistence practices of the Gravetti...

Předmostí is one of the most famous Gravettian sites in Central Europe. Its fame is based on a unique human assemblage, sadly largely destroyed during the Second World War, a huge mammoth assemblage and a very rich large canid assemblage. It has been shown previously that mammoth played an important role in the subsistence practices of the Gravetti...

Ust’-Polui is one of the most extensively studied archaeological sites in the western Siberian Arctic. New radiocarbon ( ¹⁴ C) dates for charcoal, faunal remains, bark, hide, and human bone from this site are presented. When modeled, the charcoal dates span from ~260 BC to 140 AD, overlapping with the dendrochronology dates from the site. These dat...

The spread of pastoralism in Asia is poorly understood, including how such processes affected northern forager populations. Lake Baikal’s western shore has a rich Holocene archaeological record that tracks these processes. The Early Bronze Age here is evidenced by numerous forager burials. The Early Iron Age (EIA) is thought to mark the arrival of...

This article is dedicated to the analysis of faunal remains found at the Eneolithic settlement of Gorniy Samotnel-1. This habitation site has a modeled age spanning from 3060 to 2920 cal. BC, firmly within the Middle Holocene. This site is located on the territory of Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Region on the shore of the Ob’ river. The paper considers...

This article offers new data on ancient fishing in the Big Sea region of Lake Baikal. Materials for this research were recovered during fieldwork conducted at multilayered habitation sites Sagan-Zaba II and Buguldeika II by the joint Russian-Canadian expeditions (a project between Irkutsk State University (Russia) and University of Alberta (Canada)...

Spondylosis deformans is a common degenerative condition of the spinal column, especially in modern domestic dogs. The presence and severity of lesions are related to age and physical activity, but they can be influenced by genetics, with some modern breeds being particularly predisposed. Spondylosis deformans also has been reported in prehistoric...

Stable carbon and nitrogen isotope analyses of human remains from two contemporaneous cemeteries in the Lake Baikal region of Russia indicate similarity in diets among some individuals buried in these two locations. Given that the Middle Holocene cemeteries are only 75 km apart, these dietary data could indicate overlap in foraging ranges between t...

Body mass is a key biometric that is useful in interpreting many aspects of an animal's life history. For many species, including dogs and wolves, methods for estimating body mass are not well developed. This paper assesses the utility of using limb dimensions to predict body mass in dogs and North American wolves. Regression analyses are utilized...

This article is the first publication to analyze faunal remains from early complexes (layers VII and VI) at the multilayer settlement of Sagan-Zaba II, situated on the western shore of Lake Baikal. We discuss species composition of fauna from the site as well as associated radiocarbon dates, age and sex designations, spatial distribution, and their...

Sagan-Zaba II, a habitation site on the shore of Siberia's Lake Baikal, contains a record of seal hunting that spans much of the Holocene, making it one of the longest histories of seal use in North Asia. Zooarchaeological analyses of the 16,000 Baikal seal remains from this well-dated site clearly show that sealing began here at least 9000 calenda...

We analyzed mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) from ancient marmot teeth (~7550e6800 cal. BP), which were recovered during archaeological excavations of two contemporary cemeteries near Lake Baikal, Russia: one archaeological site is the Shamanka II cemetery located on the southwest shoreline of Lake Baikal, and the other is the Lokomotiv-Raisovet cemetery...

For over 9000 years, seals were a major food source for many groups of foragers living in the Lake Baikal region of Eastern Siberia, as evidenced by the frequency of seal bones in the Holocene sites of that area. This article introduces new representations of seals and summarizes previously known seal depictions. Seal images were rather common in r...

This paper examines Holocene tends in subsistence practices through the examination of archaeological faunal remains from the Bugul'deika II habitation site on the west shore of Lake Baikal, Russian Federation. This data indicates that the primary focus of subsistence activities at the site in almost all periods was the hunting of Baikal seals (Pho...

Efforts to identify Paleolithic dogs or incipient dogs have been based mainly on examination of complete or nearly complete crania. Complete skulls are, however, very rare in the archaeological record. Because canid mandible are far more frequently found in Pleistocene assemblages, the objective of this study is to investigate whether it is possibl...

Archaeological dog remains from many areas clearly show that these animals suffered tooth fractures, tooth loss, trauma, and dental defects during their lives. Relatively little research has explored the meanings of these patterns, particularly for ancient dog remains from small-scale societies of the North. One limiting issue is the lack of compar...

Previously developed regression formulae for estimating body mass in dogs and wolves based on cranial and mandibular dimensions are evaluated using modern canid specimens of known weight at death. Some of these equations proved reliable, but others have large standard errors of estimate and likely produce unreliable mass estimates. New sets of equa...

The seals inhabiting Eastern Siberia's Lake Baikal are involved in a suite of meaningful relationships with local people both in the present and in the distant past. Most people rarely see the seals in their natural habitat, but these animals nonetheless are considered icons of the region, particularly among tourists and the broader general public....

The first objective of this study is to examine temporal patterns in ancient dog burials in the Lake Baikal region of Eastern Siberia. The second objective is to determine if the practice of dog burial here can be correlated with patterns in human subsistence practices, in particular a reliance on terrestrial mammals. Direct radiocarbon dating of a...

1a. Comparison of human and dog collagen stable carbon and nitrogen isotope values from other studies. Criterion for inclusion in the table is that the data represent multiple dogs and humans clearly from the same site and time period. Table S1b. Studies excluded in table S1a but which were reviewed because they have multiple isotope values for bot...

Lake Baikal in Eastern Siberia is one of the largest and deepest freshwater lakes in the world, and its diverse fauna were extensively utilized by local human populations over many millennia. The regional culture history models primarily are based on radiocarbon dates on human skeletal remains, and in some cases, also on dates on sediments from hab...