Dogs have been with us for 16,000 years

“The origin of dogs – probably a mix of two types of gray wolves – remains a fascinating mystery,” says Swedish geneticist Pontus Skoglund of the Francis Crick Institute, who participated in a large genomic study of the first dogs in Europe.

Accurately reconstructing the origins of the domestication of gray wolves by humans is impossible based solely on archaeological remains of canids, since the skeletons of wolves and dogs are difficult to distinguish from each other.

Two studies published this week in the journal Nature attempt to shed some light on this mystery by analyzing the DNA of these remains.

In a first study, the team led by William Marsh, from the Natural History Museum in London, together with 21 other research institutes, discovered the oldest evidence of canine DNA in the world.

“This dog lived 15,800 years ago in Pinarbasi, in modern-day Türkiye, in central Anatolia. Its DNA comes from a skull fragment. It probably looked like a small wolf. It was a baby of a few months, probably female,” describes Laurent Frantz, from the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich.

Until now the oldest evidence of a dog dated back to 10,900 years ago. These findings point to a much older domestication than previously thought.

“We don’t know exactly what the role of these dogs was. Hunting, serving as an alarm…? It can also be assumed that there was a bond between people and their dogs, especially children. Although they were not pets in the current sense, there was probably a very strong relationship. In Pinarbasi the puppies are buried on human graves,” says Laurent Frantz.

Researchers confirmed the presence of genetically similar dogs in the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, Switzerland and Türkiye during the Upper Paleolithic, between 15,800 and 14,200 years ago.

But where did they come from?

In another publication, the team led by biologist Anders Bergström compared genomes obtained from 216 canid skeletons, of which at least 181 came from pre-Neolithic sites in Europe (Switzerland, Belgium, Germany, Armenia, Turkey, Sweden, the Netherlands, Denmark and Scotland).

Thus they were able to demonstrate that the ancestry of the dogs of the first farmers of the Neolithic (about 6,000 years ago in Europe) dates back directly to the dogs of the hunter-gatherer populations of more than 14,000 years ago.

This fact provides a new perspective on the changes caused by the Neolithic agricultural revolution.

While in humans the transition to agriculture was accompanied by large-scale migrations from southwest Asia to Europe, with an important genetic mix, this did not happen in the case of dogs.

“That was the big surprise,” explains Anders Bergström. “We don’t see that mix in dogs.”

The differentiation between the dogs of Europe and those of Asia therefore took place before and outside Europe, probably in Asia.

“There is still a genetic gap between dogs and wolves. The search for the missing link continues,” concludes Pontus Skoglund.