Scientists Identify The World's First Known Dog, Which Pushes Back The Animal's Genetic Record By 5,000 Years

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.

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.

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