Humans’ deep connection to dogs spans more than 15,000 years
How old is the human-dog bond?
Scientists have discovered the oldest known ancient dog at an archaeological site in Turkey. It lived 15,800 years ago. They identified the dog’s DNA, pushing the record back 5,000 years. In addition, they identified an ancient dog – 15,000-years-old – at another site in the United Kingdom.
Meanwhile, another team conducted a wide-ranging genetic study of canid remains in Europe. They found that by 14,000 years ago, dogs had spread widely across Europe. That’s when humans were still hunter-gatherers, about 2,000 years before the development of agriculture.
William Marsh, at the Natural History Museum of London, is lead author of one of the new papers on these findings. He said:
The genetic identification of two Paleolithic dogs from Gough’s Cave [United Kingdom] and Pinarbasi [Turkey] represents a step-change in our understanding of the earliest dogs. These specimens allowed us to identify additional ancient dogs from sites in Germany, Italy and Switzerland, which clearly show that dogs were already widely dispersed across Europe and Turkey by at least 14,000 years ago.
Ian Barnes, also at the Natural History Museum, commented:
Despite the fact that humans across Europe and Turkey were culturally and genetically distinct during this period, dogs appear to have been integrated into these societies. It’s amazing to think of how these very different human groups, in very different environments, might have worked with dogs as part of their daily hunting and fishing activities.
These studies were published as two papers in the peer-reviewed journal Nature on March 25, 2026. One paper covered discoveries in Turkey and the UK, while the other paper described ancient canine remains in other parts of Europe.
Using DNA to identify early canines
Sometime in the distant past, humans domesticated a line of gray wolves (Canis lupus). By the end of the last Ice Age, genetic changes in these animals due to domestication had given rise to a wolf subspecies: Canis lupus familiaris, otherwise known as dogs.
As people first began to domesticate dogs, the skeletons of wolves and dogs weren’t very different. Therefore, it’s hard for researchers to distinguish between them when examining these long-ago bones. So the researchers turned to sophisticated genomic analysis techniques, using DNA extracted from bones. They compared the genomes from ancient canid remains that were older than 10,000 years to those of dogs alive today. Which of the ancient DNA, from the bones, belonged to wolves and dogs?
Anders Bergström, of the University of East Anglia and lead author of one of the papers, told The Francis Crick Institute:
We worked out how similar each sample is to a present-day dog. We managed to classify a remarkable 141 out of 216 remains, with some surprises. For example, a 13,700-year-old canid from Belgium, previously thought to be a dog due to its small size and traces of human modification, turned out to be a wolf. This highlighted that it is not always easy to tell a dog from a wolf based on skeletal evidence alone.
Which gray wolves were the ancestors of dogs?
That moment when a group of humans domesticated gray wolves is lost in the mists of time. But scientists think it happened sometime during the last Ice Age.
They have also wondered: Were dogs domesticated separately in different locations? Previous research indicated dogs descended from wolves in eastern Eurasia and western Eurasia. In this new study, the scientists ran a statistical analysis of the ancient European dogs’ genomes.
Their model indicated the dogs mostly descended from eastern Eurasian wolves, though some had a little ancestry from the western Eurasian wolves.
Bergström said:
So, European wolves didn’t contribute detectably to dog evolution, and there’s no evidence that European dogs would have undergone an independent domestication process separate from dogs in Asia, as both share the same ancestry profile.
Exchanges with ancient hunter-gatherer and farming communities
Paleolithic (Old Stone Age) communities probably exchanged dogs with one another. Greger Larson of the University of Oxford told the Natural History Museum:
By comparing the DNA from these ancient dogs with other ancient and modern populations, we were surprised to see just how closely related the earliest dogs were despite living more than 2,500 miles (about 4,000 km) apart. This suggests that the first dogs were a game changer and spread rapidly across Europe.
Laurent Frantz, of the University of Munich added:
The fact that people exchanged dogs so early means these animals must have been important. With limited resources, keeping them implies they served a purpose, and one possibility is that they acted as a highly efficient alarm system.
During the Neolithic, there was a migration of Anatolian (Asia Minor) people who brought agricultural know-how to Europe. Pontus Skoglund, of the Francis Crick Institute, commented:
Dogs from local hunter-gatherer groups already living in Europe contributed substantially to the genetics of dog populations living with Neolithic farmers, so these native dogs were likely adopted by the first farmers. This contrasts, for example, with the colonial expansion into the Americas, where native dogs were almost entirely replaced by the incoming European dogs.
Today, most European dog breeds can trace about 50% of their ancestry back to those ancient hunter-gatherer dogs. Skoglund added:
Most of the dogs running about in a local park today trace some of their ancestry to dogs living in Europe over 14,000 years ago. It’s fascinating that we’ve walked alongside each other for so many thousands of years, despite considerable changes in human lifestyles.
Dogs held a cultural significance in hunter-gatherer societies
At the Gough’s Cave site in the UK, humans deliberately buried their dogs. Furthermore, as Simon Parfitt, of the University College London, said:
Some bones show deliberate human modification, including perforations in mandibles, suggesting these dogs held symbolic significance after death as well as companionship during life.
Meanwhile, at the site near Pinarbasi, Turkey, humans also deliberately buried their dogs. Doug Baird, of the University of Liverpool, observed:
The archaeology makes it clear that these dogs were close companions of humans. Isotope analysis shows the dogs ate fish, a major element of the human diet. And like humans, they were carefully buried in the rock shelter near human burial, thereby receiving ritualized treatment analogous to the humans.
These people hunted animals like wild sheep and dangerous wild cattle, so it seems likely that these animals were hunting but also possibly guard dogs, given the presence of large predators like wolves and leopards in central Anatolia at that time.
Bottom line: The oldest-known dogs, according to genetic analysis, lived about 15,000 years ago. They were widespread in Europe by 14,000 years ago.
Source: Dogs were widely distributed across western Eurasia during the Palaeolithic
Source: Genomic history of early dogs in Europe
Via:
Natural History Museum
University of Liverpool
The Francis Crick Institute
University of York
University College London
Read more: Most dogs still have a little wolf in them
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