Who let the wolves in? Genetic record for domestic dogs pushed back by 5,000 years

""Every time people move, they take their dogs with them. We call it the Swiss army dog. They can adapt to all these cultural roles.""

"Despite decades of intense archaeological and genetic study, scientists still don't know when or where, let alone why, dogs were first domesticated by humans."

"The challenge has been discerning domestic dogs from wolves when the remains are often fragmentary: bones as old as 30,000 years had been linked to domestic dogs on the basis of their shape, only for DNA sequencing to confirm them as being those of wolves."

"Before the latest studies, the oldest dog DNA came from fossils nearly 11,000 years old, from northwest Russia."

Recent studies have identified the oldest dog genomes from remains in the UK, Switzerland, and Turkey, dating back 14,000 to 16,000 years. This discovery extends the genetic record of dogs by over 5,000 years and reveals an early domestic dog population that existed across Western Eurasia. The genetic signature of these ancient dogs is still present in modern breeds. While the studies do not determine the exact origins of dog domestication, they suggest that dogs were integral to early human communities and were exchanged among diverse groups.

Read at Nature