Stories from our Coast Salish oral tradition are not often supported by modern science. But biochemists in Britain have confirmed what many of our elders knew all the time; our ancestors in past centuries raised a special breed of dog for use in blanket weaving.

There is little evidence left of the now-extinct dog (it had disappeared by 1900). But explorer George Vancouver wrote about them in the 1700s when he said their hair was "a mixture of a coarse kind of wool, with very fine, long hair, capable of being spun into yarn". There is only one real piece of evidence of the dog’s existence in the form of a hide in a US museum.

Our oral history had many stories about the animals (it looked something like the modern Spitz breed). But there were doubters who said blankets were woven only from mountain goat wool that our ancestors traded for with other peoples.

In stepped the biochemists from the University of York. Their molecular analysis of nine Coast Salish blankets showed that some fibers matched the DNA of those in the hide of the dog in the US museum.

The Coast Salish apparently bred the dog for both the fleece-like undercoat and its long outer hairs. Blankets made using dog hair, combined with those from the mountain goat, were probably used mainly for every-day purposes. Ceremonial blankets seem to contain only goat hair.

Photo caption: This painting, entitled A woman weaving a blanket is by Canadian Paul Kane from about 1856. It is from the Royal Ontario Museum.

Info source: http://news.sciencemag.org