When first observed by Europeans the unhappy Beothiks (of Newfoundland) had apparently no domestic dogs, only “tame wolves”, whom they distinguished from the wild wolves by marking their ears.  They were made more angry by the European seamen attacking and killing the wolves than by anything else they did.  Apparently some kind of alliance had been struck up between the Beothiks—­a nation of hunters—­and the wolf packs which followed in their tracks; and the Newfoundland wolves were on the way to becoming domesticated “dogs”.  Later on it was realized that the island did produce a special breed—­the celebrated Newfoundland dog—­the original type of which was much smaller than the modern type, nearly or entirely black in colour, with a sharper muzzle and less pendulous ears.  But its feet were as strongly webbed and its habits as aquatic as those of the “Newfoundland” of the modern breed.  Some people have noticed the resemblance between the farmers’ dogs in Norway and the Newfoundland type, and have thought that the latter may not be altogether of wolf extraction, but be descended from the dogs brought from Norway and Iceland by the Norse adventurers who visited Newfoundland in the tenth and eleventh centuries.]

On the Pacific coast there were other types of domestic dog, resembling greatly breeds that are found in eastern Asia and the Pacific islands.  Some of these were naked, and others grew silky hair, which was woven by the natives into cloth (see p. 323).  The Eskimo dog almost certainly has been derived from northern Asia, and is closely related to the well-known Chinese breed—­the chow dog—­and the domestic breeds of ancient Europe.  Even the commonest type of house dog in the Roman Empire was very much like an Eskimo or a chow in appearance.  There is a true wild dog, however, in the Yukon province of the Canadian Dominion and in Alaska—­Canis pambasileus—­a dark, blackish-brown in colour.  This may have been a parent of the Eskimo dog, but it is also doubtless closely allied to the original (extinct) wild dog of northern Asia, from which the chow and many other breeds are directly descended.  The Eskimo never under ordinary circumstances ate their dogs; on the other hand, the Amerindians were fond of dog’s flesh, and in some tribes simply bred dogs for the table.

When Europeans first reached America all these Amerindian tribes, and also the Eskimo, were still, for all practical purposes, in the Stone Age.  Those who lived in the north had discovered the use of copper and had shaped for themselves knives and spear blades out of copper, but not even this metal was in use to any great extent, and for the most part they relied, down to the end of the eighteenth century, for their implements and weapons, on polished and sharpened stones, on deer’s antlers, buffalo horns, sticks, sharp shells, beavers’ incisor teeth,[3] the claws or spines of crustaceans, flints, and suchlike substances—­in short, they were leading the same life and using almost exactly the same tools as the long-since-vanished hunter races of Europe of five thousand to one hundred thousand years ago—­the people who pursued the mammoth, the bison, the Irish “elk”, and the other great beasts of prehistoric Europe.  Indeed, North America represented to some extent, as late as a hundred years ago, what Europe must have looked like in the days of palaeolithic Man.