Marquesan Dog
dog breed
The Marquesan Dog or Marquesas Islands Dog is an extinct breed of dog from the Marquesas Islands. Similar to other strains of Polynesian dogs, it was introduced to the Marquesas by the ancestors of the Polynesian people during their migrations. Serving as tribal totems and religious symbols, they were sometimes consumed as meat although less frequently than in other parts of the Pacific because of their scarcity. These native dogs are thought to have become extinct before the arrival of Europeans, who did not record their presence on the islands. Petroglyphic representations of dogs and the archaeological remains of dog bones and burials are the only evidence that the breed ever existed. Modern dog populations on the island are the descendants of foreign breeds later reintroduced in the 19th century as companions for European settlers.
Linguistic
There are two words in the Marquesan language for dog: peto, used in the Northern Marquesas, and nuhe, used in the Southern Marquesas. The former might have been an English loanword from pet or a Spanish loanword from perro (dog), although pero was an alternative for dog (kurī) in the related Māori language. According to another theory supporting its foreign origin, the name came from a New Haven dog named Pato left on Nuku Hiva by the American sea captain Edmund Fanning from 1798 to 1803. The South Marquesan Nuhe is unique in the Polynesian languages, but may have some connection to wanuhe, the word for dog in the Papuan language of the Brumer Islands.
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This entry incorporates text from “Marquesan Dog” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.