Scientists Identify the World’s First Known Dog, Which Pushes Back the Animals’ Genetic Record by About 5,000 Years

Two new ancient DNA studies suggest that domesticated dogs were widespread in western Eurasia more than 14,000 years ago

Dogs have been man’s best friend for a long, long time.

The beloved animals were living alongside humans in western Eurasia around 14,000 to 16,000 years ago—before humans developed agriculture—according to two studies published in the journal Nature on March 25. The findings push back the earliest genetic evidence of a domesticated canine by about 5,000 years and provide new insights about how dogs spread.

Today’s barking furry friends descended from ancient wolves, but researchers aren’t sure exactly when domestication began. An analysis published in 2015 that involved computer simulations of the canine family tree suggests that the split occurred around 27,000 to 40,000 years ago. But the previous oldest genetic evidence of a domesticated dog, based on remains found in northwestern Russia, was dated to nearly 11,000 years ago.

In one of the new studies, researchers examined DNA in bones from more than 200 canines recovered from several archaeological sites in Europe and southwestern Asia, including Turkey, Switzerland and Scotland. Analyses revealed some of the animals were dogs and that the oldest was a Swiss animal dated to 14,200 years ago, which lived with a hunter-gatherer group. It shared ancestry with later dogs that resided elsewhere, hinting that the creatures descended from one population and distinct human societies were acquiring dogs from one another.

“It is kind of the equivalent of a new blade or a new point or a new kind of material culture or art form or something, where everybody’s getting really excited about having this fun new thing around,” says Greger Larson, a paleogeneticist at the University of Oxford in England and co-author of both studies, to Emily Anthes at the New York Times. “And it’s useful, and it’s interesting, and it’s probably cute.”

The other study found even older genetic evidence of a dog. Remains from a site in Turkey yielded a 15,800-year-old domesticated animal. DNA analyses revealed ancient dogs at other sites in western Eurasia, including a 14,300-year-old individual in England. Despite being separated by nearly 2,000 miles, the Turkish and English dogs were also closely genetically related, suggesting that the creatures were widespread in the region by that time.

What’s more, they “were treated in very similar ways,” William Marsh, a paleogeneticist at the Natural History Museum in London who co-authored the study, says to Ewen Callaway at Nature. While the human cultures at each site differed, chemical analyses suggest that people from both groups fed their dogs the same food they ate. The English animal’s skull also had decorative perforations, like those found on human skulls, and in Turkey, dogs were buried on top of deceased people.

Later, when the first farmers arrived in Europe from southwestern Asia around 9,000 years ago, they also brought dogs with them, spurring more animal trading. While these humans nearly fully replaced earlier populations in Europe, they seem to have kept the European dogs around. Only about 50 percent of European dog DNA was replaced in later animals, according to the new research.

“They seem to incorporate these dogs rather than trying to replace them with their own,” says Anders Bergström, a geneticist at the University of East Anglia in England, who co-authored both papers, to David Grimm at Science.

The new work supports the idea that all dogs came from one place, possibly somewhere in Asia, with additional interbreeding of early dogs and wolves, Adam Boyko, a geneticist at Cornell University who wasn’t involved in the new research, to Science News’ Tom Metcalfe. “Of course, we can’t rule out that some early fossils classified as wolves were actually tame and effectively dogs,” he adds. “But from the standpoint of modern dogs, it seems they all share a single domestication origin.”

Still, the researchers don’t know what roles the dogs played in hunter-gatherer populations 14,000 years ago, Laurent Frantz, a paleogeneticist at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in Germany who worked on both studies, tells the Times. It’s possible that they performed different jobs within each unique human society.

Some of the biggest mysteries around dogs remain to be uncovered. Scientists still don’t know where dogs come from, or who first domesticated them.

Regardless, the studies provide a “significant advance” in understanding the origins of dogs, Beth Shapiro, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who was not involved in the work, tells Science News.