Dogs are the oldest domesticated species on Earth. Scientists have long known they diverged from grey wolves somewhere toward the end of the last Ice Age — but pinning down exactly when, and confirming it with hard genetic evidence, has proved remarkably difficult. Early dog and wolf skeletons are nearly indistinguishable, making DNA analysis essential.
This week, two landmark studies published simultaneously in the journal Nature have pushed the earliest confirmed genetic evidence of domestic dogs back by more than 5,000 years. The most ancient dog identified in the research dates to approximately 15,800 years ago — found at a rock shelter called Pınarbaşı in central Türkiye (Turkey), where three small canine skeletons had been carefully placed above a human grave. DNA analysis, led by researchers at the Natural History Museum in London and the University of Oxford, confirmed the animals were fully domesticated dogs, not wolves.
A second dog of almost the same age was identified from Gough's Cave in Somerset, in southwestern England — located at the opposite edge of Europe. Despite the thousands of miles between the two sites, and despite being associated with human communities that were culturally and genetically very different from each other, the two dogs were genetically almost identical. The research team concluded they must have shared a common origin — and that a single population of dogs spread with remarkable speed across the entire width of Europe during the late Ice Age, likely because of their value to the hunter-gatherer communities they travelled with.
By 14,000 years ago, dogs had been identified at further sites in Germany, Italy, and Switzerland. The research confirms that humans had dogs as loyal companions thousands of years before the development of agriculture — before settled villages, before farming, before almost everything we associate with civilisation. Which means that whatever else has changed about us over the millennia, one thing has stayed remarkably constant: we have always kept dogs.