Who let the dogs out? It’s not yet clear, but researchers are now one step closer to discovering how humankind’s canine companions began.
The domestication of dogs has a dark past. Humans have had furry friends for thousands of yearsbut the precise chronology of canid domestication into modern dogs is difficult to pin down. The research, published in today Advances in scienceoffers domestication-specific timestamps, or something resembling it, from 76 ancient canid fossils found across Beringia.
“The general hypothesis is that domestication happened once and clearly separated canids that interact with people (dogs) from those that don’t (wolves),” said François Lanoë, an archaeologist at the University of Arizona and lead author of the research, in an email to Gizmodo. “Our study shows instead that relationships between canids and humans were complex, continue to be complex today, and involve more than domestication, but also things like the domestication of wild wolves and commensality (wolves hanging around settlements humans).”
In other words, domestication occurred to varying degrees, in different places, and at different times in the prehistoric past. This ambiguity is approved by some previous researchwhich suggested that prehistoric humans used early dogs as hunting companions, but some of the other canids were attracted to humanity by piles of garbage and food.
For the new study, the team studied 76 specimens of canids – hybrid dogs and wolfdogs, but also wolves and coyotes – from late Pleistocene and Holocene sites in Interior Alaska. The team also included remains of modern wolves from Alaska in their morphological and genomic analyses, which indicated that some of the ancient canids on some river sites had more salmon in their diet than other specimens in the dataset. Other canids in the data set had diets that included fish and game.
“This is the clincher why they don’t actually hunt salmon in the wild,” Ben Potter, an archaeologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, said in a University of Arizona statement. “It asks the existential question, what is a dog?”
Although domestication has produced breeds as disparate as the Chihuahua and Great Dane, some modern dogs still bear a strong resemblance to their ancient ancestors; in 2020, another research team discovered this sled dogs they have an unbroken genetic ancestry dating back to the end of the last ice age. Since ancient wild canids did not regularly hunt salmon, fish records are a useful barometer to indicate when some animals began to habituate to humans.
“I really like the idea that, for as long as we know, for as long as we know, it is a repeatable cultural experience that I have this relationship and this level of love with my dog,” said Evelyn Combs, a member of Healy Lake and archaeologist for the tribe’s cultural preservation office, in the Arizona version. “I know that throughout history these relationships have always been present. I really like that we can look at the records and see that thousands of years ago we still had our companions.”
Other research into the history of dogs and their domestication has revealed everything from the origins of dog coats to how these creatures relate to wild dogs today. Work published in 2021 found this out yellow coats for dogsseen in breeds such as the shiba inu, it is inherited from an ancient canid that split from Pleistocene wolves two million years ago. While some ancient links remain intact, more recent relationships between dogs and their close relatives today, namely the Australian dingo,they are not that strong.
The lessons of the recent paper could also be applied to the interactions that previous human groups had with other animals, including foxes-which are not canids, despite their strange resemblance -e chickenswhich evolved from jungle birds in Southeast Asia. Fossil evidence provides some details about domestication, but so do genetic analyses, as highlighted by a 2022 paper in which researchers studied 238 donkey genomes for them. the domestication of the wild ass. Recent work’s use of dietary analysis is a clever approach to the question of domestication: we are human, after all, and remain fallible to the sad look of a puppy dog’s eyes begging for some smoked salmon.
It’s still unclear who let the dogs out, but the latest research offers new clues about how the human-dog partnership began, even if those beginnings have no clear answer.
