Archaeologists working at Castillo de Huarmey, a Wari Empire site on Peru's northern coast, have uncovered 1,200-year-old remains of Peruvian hairless dogs. The find, reported in the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, is the first physical evidence of the breed at the site and includes naturally mummified specimens preserved by the region's arid desert conditions.
The site, about 190 miles north of Lima, served as an administrative and burial center between 600 and 1050 CE. Among the dog remains were a mummified skull still bearing hairless skin and ears and colored with cinnabar, a second larger skull, and a nearly complete mummified male skeleton buried in a shallow pit. All three lacked their first premolars, a trait that helped researchers identify them as Peruvian hairless dogs rather than other breeds.
Lead author Weronika Tomczyk of Dartmouth said the missing teeth were not lost during the animals' lifetimes but were a breed characteristic. The burial arrangements point to complex human-animal relationships: some dogs were treated with care, while other animal remains at the site appear to have been discarded as waste. Tomczyk noted that reconstructing past bonds is challenging because emotions are hard to capture archaeologically, and that people in the past likely had contradictory relationships with animals, as they do today.