How long ago did you live the oldest domestic dog of which there is a record? Scientists from different universities in Europe came to that answer after analyzing bone fragments corresponding to a puppy born and buried in present-day Türkiye.
The answer is 15,800 years. In those days, the inhabitants of the Anatolian volcanic plateau buried a litter of puppies in the Pınarbaşı site. The animals were barely months old.
Small bone fragments similar to “freeze-dried” coffee beans obtained from that place and analyzed by teams from the Natural History Museum in London, the University of Munich and the Francis Crick Institute in London, determined the revealing data.
The conclusions of the studies
The research conclusions were published in two studies shared in in the magazine Nature. One was from the remains of the Pınarbaşı puppies and the other was from those found in Gough’s Cavein Somerset (United Kingdom), dating back 14,300 years.
Until 15,800, the earliest genetic evidence of domestic dogs dated back to 10,900 years. Now, the date has been brought forward to Upper Paleolithicwhen human beings were hunter-gatherers and there were no other domesticated animals or companions of man, such as cows, goats, pigs or horses. The team managed to find enough nuclear DNA to prove that they were domestic dogs and not wolves.
Another important conclusion of the research is that the Pınarbaşı dog is genetically “almost identical” to its peers who lived 4,000 years later. Which means that Humans changed, but dogs didn’t..
For example, the hunter-gatherers of Anatolia shared the same animals as the Magdalenian hunters, people adapted to the extreme cold of northern Europe who owned the oldest domestic dogs known to the studies. Recent research showed that through dogs there was interaction between both societies that lived in completely different times.
Another finding has to do with the status of canines in those times. The dogs of Türkiye ate the same fish that humans ate and were buried next to men and women and subjected to the same rituals as them. That is to say: They were considered equal to people.
Its usefulness was possibly a valuable asset or as a hunting tool. One member of the study said that, although it cannot be known with certainty, the dogs of that time «must have been used for something specific; perhaps as alarm systems or in hunting, because they were expensive to feed (…) And even then, children probably played with the puppies.»
It also implies that a population of dogs had spread rapidly throughout western Eurasia before the end of the last Ice Age.
Anders Bergströmthe signatory of one of the studies, stated that the lineage of the dogs of that time persists to this day and that current European dogs, such as the German Shepherd or the Saint Bernard, carry the imprint of these animals in their genome.
