Two studies on dog DNA: The dog traveled with people in Europe already during the Ice Age

Dogs the oldest DNA found predates our understanding of when the dog was domesticated as a human companion.

Dogs have apparently accompanied human communities around 16,000 years ago. It is 5,000 years earlier than previously thought.

At that time, the dogs were apparently a mixture of two gray wolf species, says the Swedish geneticist Pontus Skoglund. He works in a British at the Francis Crick Institute.

However, researchers still do not know the exact time when dogs genetically separated from wolves.

Science journal Nature recently published two archaeological studies on dog DNA.

Another study traced the dog’s history from finds, for example skull palasista Pinarbaşissawhich is in present-day Turkey.

Zoologist Laurent Frantz writes that the skull belonged to a female puppy, estimated to be a few months old.

According to Frantz, it looked like a small wolf about 15,800 years ago. Paleontologist Frantz works at the Ludwig–Maximilians University in Munich, Germany.

Before this, the oldest dog DNA read through, or sequenced, was around 10,900 years ago.

Dogs the archeological DNA “record” was also broken by dog ​​DNA isolated from Gough’s Cave in southwestern England.

Its DNA is about 14,300 years old. The last ice age began to end in Europe about 10,000 years ago.

Researchers have not been able to explain exactly what role dogs played as human companions during the Ice Age.

“We can assume that dogs were important to humans, because feeding dogs took its toll,” says Frantz on the Science Alert website. The isotopes of the bones reveal that dogs received good nutrition in the area of ​​present-day Turkey.

Dogs were perhaps used to help with hunting. They also protected and warned hunter-gatherers who were constantly on the move.

Human and there was a strong bond between the dogs, says Frantz.

One example is that in Pinarbaş, puppy bones were found buried in people’s graves.

The children may be playing with the puppies. However, dogs may not have been treated only as pets, as the majority of dogs are now.

Dogs another dna study compared 216 dogs and wolves remnant genomes. DNA had been collected from samples from different parts of Europe.

There were so many samples that it made it possible to map how dogs developed and spread in Europe at one time.

There was a large migration of people from northwest Asia to Europe around 10,000 years ago. Migrants gradually moved to farming and cattle breeding all over Europe.

The genes of the studied dogs were closer to current European dog breeds than, for example, Siberian Huskies.

The genes of people from different regions mixed a lot. The dogs’ genes don’t seem to have mixed together at the same time. It surprised the researchers.

INHERITANCE Based on this, it seems that people who lived in Europe kept dogs with them before farming became common.

Dogs would have been domesticated in Europe even before humans started growing crops or keeping domestic animals, researchers say newspaper in The Guardian.

The exact time of taming is not known. There is a “genetic gap” between dogs and wolves that needs to be resolved, says Skoglund news agency AFP by.