Humans and dogs — scientists find new proof of ancient bond

A female puppy that lived some 15,800 years ago in present-day Turkey has been labeled as the earliest-known dog by scientists in papers published on Wednesday.

The remains are nearly 5,000 years older than the previously known oldest dog.

Researchers found a piece of the dog's skull in Pinarbasi, a rock shelter site used by ancient hunter-gatherers. By examining it and analyzing its DNA, the scientists concluded the pup was "a few months old" and probably looked like a small wolf, according to Laurent Frantz of the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich.

Frantz is a co-author of a study looking at distribution of dogs across Europe and Asia during the Paleolithic period, which was published in the prestigious Nature magazine on Wednesday.

The researcher said it was not fully clear what role dogs played among humans at that time. However, while the relationship between ancient humans and their dogs may not have been the same as in modern times, "kids will still have played with puppies," he added.

Humans and dogs buried together

Geneticist Anders Bergström of the University of East Anglia in the UK, co-author of the same study and the lead author of another study focusing on genomic history of dogs in Europe, also published on Wednesday, agreed that "dogs do not always have very clearly defined roles or purposes for humans."

"Perhaps their primary role is often just to provide companionship," Bergström said.

Artifacts of the human community at Pinarbasi give insight into human history during the last ice age, which ended some 10,000 years ago.

William Marsh, a postdoctoral researcher in the Ancient Genomics Laboratory at the Francis Crick Institute in ​London, said there was evidence of a bond between the two species at the Turkish site.

"At Pinarbasi, we have both human and dog burials, with dogs buried alongside humans," Marsh said.

There was also evidence that hunter-gatherers at Pinarbasi fed fish to their dogs.

Missing link between dogs and wolves

Dogs are believed to have been domesticated by humans earlier than any other animal. They are descended from gray wolves, but similarities between the two species make it tricky for scientists to distinguish their remains.

Even with this uncertainty, the researchers believe that dog and wolf populations diverged at least 24,000 years ago, said William Marsh. 

Bergström and his colleagues also identified the oldest dog in Europe by examining remains from 14,200 years ago from Switzerland's Kesslerloch. Also, the ancient European dogs seem to have shared ancestors with dogs in Asia, hinting at a single domestication event.

But Bergström warned that the question of "when, where and why people domesticated dogs still remain largely unanswered."

Another researcher, Swedish geneticist Pontus Skoglund, said there was still a "genetic abyss between dogs and wolves."

"The search for the missing link continues," he said.

Edited by: Sean Sinico