Humans Had Dogs Much Earlier Than Thought

Long before humans planted their first crops, they were apparently feeding something else: dogs. Two new DNA studies in Nature push the earliest confirmed dogs in Europe and Western Asia back to at least 15,800 years ago, showing they were living with hunter-gatherers thousands of years before agriculture. Researchers sequenced genomes from ancient canines at sites stretching from Britain to Turkey and found that, despite being linked to very different human cultures, the animals were strikingly similar to one another, the New York Times reports.

"The people are so different, but the dogs are very much the same," says paleogeneticist Greger Larson, a co-author of both studies. "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," Larson says. "And it's useful and it's interesting and it's probably cute." The studies push back the oldest known genetic evidence of dogs by almost 5,000 years. The oldest canine DNA was found in the skull of a female puppy that lived in what is now Turkey 15,800 years ago.

Researchers identified genetically related Paleolithic dogs at five sites tied to three distinct hunter-gatherer cultures. They believed the dogs filled a range of roles, more "Swiss army knife" than specialist sled-puller or herder. "The dogs might be doing different things, but the dogs themselves are all the same color, same height, same genomic ancestry," Larson says. Researchers found evidence that hunter-gatherers buried the dogs like humans when they died, pointing to an early, close bond. While they may not have played the same role as today's pets, "kids will still have played with puppies," says study co-author Laurent Frantz, per France24.

"Dogs were clearly important to our ancestors, as the first farmers seem to have adopted previous hunter-gatherer dogs into their groups as they moved into Europe," says study co-author Pontus Skoglund. Many modern European dogs still carry ancestry from those Paleolithic companions. As for where dogs were first domesticated, scientists say that mystery remains unsolved. There is still a "genetic abyss between dogs and wolves," Skoglund says.