Humans and Dogs Have Been Best Friends Even Longer Than We Thought

In this article:

• How old is the first dog?
• When did humans domesticate dogs?
• What does this mean for my relationship with my dog?

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Cave people may not have been pushing their dogs around in strollers and throwing them birthday parties, but new evidence suggests that they loved them all the same.

According to new research published in the journal Nature, dogs split off from wolves earlier than we thought; in fact, dogs predate agriculture. Domesticated dogs were living with humans almost 16,000 years ago—5,000 years earlier than previously known. And there’s reason to believe that long-ago humans treated their dogs like family, much as we do today. Here are the details.

Dogs and humans go way back.

The earliest known dog dates back 15,800 years, the paper’s authors found.

They analyzed genetic information from ancient dog remains found in modern-day Turkey, Serbia, and England. The oldest remains belonged to a puppy and came from an archaeological excavation site in Turkey called Pinarbaşi. Researchers investigating dog origins face the challenge of having to genetically distinguish dogs and wolves, sometimes finding a skull that looks like a dog’s but has a wolf’s genetics. The remains in Turkey, however, were all dog.

“We found ancient, 16,000-year-old DNA samples that sit right bang-smack within the diversity of both modern and ancient dogs,” said geneticist and paper co-author Lachie Scarsbrook, DPhil, a research associate at the University of Oxford School of Archaeology and a postdoctoral researcher at Ludwig Maximilian University in Germany. These remains came from a fully domesticated dog, meaning that the domestication process kicked off long before he or she roamed the Earth.

The remains in both Turkey and 2,000 miles away in Cheddar, England came from human burial sites associated with different hunter-gatherer groups. The fact that these early humans buried dogs alongside their human dead suggests they held them in high esteem.

“The close relationship that a lot of people have with dogs today isn’t a modern thing,” Dr. Scarsbrook said. “16,000 years ago, people were also treating their dogs like dogs.”

An artist’s reconstruction of early humans interacting with early dogs at Pinarbaşi 15,800 years ago. Credit: Kathryn Killackey

A mutually beneficial bond

The bond between humans and dogs may have come about as long as 40,000 years ago, growing out of a cooperative relationship between early humans and wolves. And, by 16,000 years ago, people already considered dogs distinct from wolves—and treated them more like friends. “If you’re burying a puppy with [humans], there’s clearly some symbolic reason you’re doing that,” Dr. Scarsbrook said.

Considering the resources it would have taken to keep a dog alive 16,000 years ago, these animals must have meant quite a lot to their people. Dr. Scarsbrook said the dogs could have acted as alerts against threats—or even offered warmth at night. “Which is quite a nice thought,” he added—“that people 15,000 years ago were in their caves, hugging their dogs.”

If these ritual burials were already happening 16,000 years ago, then domestication would’ve occurred well before that. Dr. Scarsbrook projected that dogs may have been fully domesticated as far back as 25,000 years ago, during the last Ice Age. The process likely began another 15,000 years before that, when humans and wolves began cooperating with each other.

Genetic analysis revealed more evidence that dogs were dear to ancient humans. The four sets of remains closely resembled each other genetically, indicating they were closely related. This suggests that migrating hunter-gatherer networks brought their dogs with them as they moved, possibly helping to spread dogs throughout the region.

The authors performed genetic analysis of a 14,300-year-old jawbone from a dog found in Gough’s Cave in Cheddar, England. Credit: Tom Anders/Longleat Estate

From caves to sofas

The barks from these bygone canines reverberate throughout history, all the way to our own dogs’ genes.

“The DNA that we found in these 16,000-year-old dogs is present in modern-day breeds,” Dr. Scarsbrook said. “There’s the ancestry carried from these dogs that were living alongside hunter-gatherers all the way up into the dogs that are sitting on our sofas today.”

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