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Dogs are man’s best (and oldest – see CA 352 and 401) friends, but how they came to be that way is still a bit of a mystery. Based on morphological changes and genetic estimations, they are believed to have diverged from wolves sometime between 40,000 and 20,000 years ago. Despite this, the oldest DNA-confirmed domesticated canine only dates to the Mesolithic period, c.11,000 years ago, with every Palaeolithic canid specimen that has been genetically analysed up until that point proving to be a wolf. This raised the question of whether dog and wolf populations during the Palaeolithic were distinct enough to be identified genetically. Now, however, two new key discoveries have revealed the first confirmed dogs dating to the Palaeolithic, helping to unlock one more piece in the puzzle of canine domestication.
The first discovery was a seemingly insignificant canine mandible that had been recovered during excavations at Gough’s Cave in Cheddar, Somerset, in the 1920s (below). Its importance was not recognised at the time, so it sat in a museum drawer for almost a century until it was recently rediscovered. The second was found during excavations at Pınarbaşı, a remote hunter-gatherer site in central Turkey, in 2004. There, the remains of three puppies were found in a pit directly above a human burial. While their proximity to humans immediately suggested that they could be the remains of dogs, full genetic testing to confirm this was not available at the time.
Both specimens have now undergone successful DNA extraction and analysis, and the results (published in Nature: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10170-x) confirmed unequivocally that these were dogs. With the Pınarbaşı example dating to 15,800 years ago and the Gough’s Cave one dating to 14,300 years ago, this pushes back the timeline for confirmed dogs by over 5,000 years, establishing that dogs were genetically distinct from wolves by this time. What’s more, the mitochondrial DNA (the small portion of an individual’s genome that is inherited solely through the mother) of these two specimens was a close match to other Palaeolithic canine remains from Germany, Switzerland, and Italy, revealing that these European animals were dogs as well.
These findings show that dogs were widespread throughout Europe during the Upper Palaeolithic – and, despite their geographical distances, the recently analysed canines were all found to be almost genetically identical, suggesting that they came from the same population. The humans with whom they were buried, however, did not display the same genetic similarity. The people interred at Gough’s Cave were part of the Magdalenian culture, which appeared in Britain at the end of the last Ice Age (CA 330); the people at Pınarbaşı were Anatolian hunter-gatherers, the ancestors of the first farmers who would go on to spread agriculture throughout Europe; while the German, Swiss, and Italian dogs were found with Epigravettian populations who lived throughout southern and eastern Europe at this time.
The most recent common ancestor of the Gough’s Cave and Pınarbaşı specimens is dated to 16,900 years ago and, crucially, must have lived before c.18,500 years ago. This post-dates the divergence of Magdalenian and Epigravettian populations in Europe, which probably occurred during or before the Last Glacial Maximum between 24,000 and 21,000 years ago. Based on this timing and the wide geographical distribution seen in these samples, the researchers suggest that domesticated canines spread across Europe with Epigravettian groups c.16,000 years ago. There is little evidence of gene flow between Magdalenian and Epigravettian populations, however, particularly in Britain. Previously, this had been interpreted as a lack of interaction between these two groups, but the fact that they were at least trading dogs between them calls such assumptions into question.
Dr Lachie Scarsbrook from LMU Munich, who co-led the study with William Marsh from the Natural History Museum in London, said: ‘Not only has this discovery pushed back the earliest direct evidence of dogs by 5,000 years, it also showed us that dogs and wolves were clearly separate, both biologically and in how humans interacted with them, at least 16,000 years ago. This suggests that dog domestication likely took place sometime during the last Ice Age, more than 10,000 years before the appearance of any other domestic plants or animals, which really does secure their title as “man’s best friends”.’
Text: Kathryn Krakowka / Image: Trustees of the Natural History Museum
