via Archaeology in Oceania, 18 October 2023: Paper by Koungoulos and Brumm synthesizes historical and ethnographic data to explore the impact of hunting dogs on prehistoric subsistence in New Guinea. It reviews their assistance in hunting various game, improving yields and altering the dietary composition of human diets. The paper also discusses the broader socioeconomic implications, including potential shifts in the taxonomic composition of hunted game, and how these findings might be reflected archaeologically. It contrasts the hunting practices in New Guinea with those in Island Southeast Asia (ISEA) and Australia, suggesting the integration of dogs significantly altered prehistoric foraging regimes, especially highlighting their role in capturing specific game like wild pigs and tree kangaroos.
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.
