Ancient DNA Study Rewrites Origins of Europe’s First Dogs

Scientists extracted and analyzed DNA from 216 canid remains, including 181 from Paleolithic and Mesolithic Europe. The oldest data recovered comes from a 14,200-year-old dog from the Kesslerloch site in Switzerland. Their results suggest that domestic dogs (Canis lupus familiar) predate agriculture and share deep ancestry with wolves (Dog lupus) from Eurasia, challenging ideas about where and how domestication began.

Bergstrom and others. found that dogs were domesticated more than 14,000 years ago and that dogs living in pre-agricultural Europe contributed substantially to the genetics of dogs living post-agriculture and today. Illustration by John James Audubon and John Bachman.

Dogs were domesticated from gray wolves near the end of the last ice age, becoming the first animals to form a domestic partnership with humans.

Where this process took place and the human group(s) involved remain uncertain.

The earliest known canid remains likely exhibiting a dog-like morphology were found in Europe, dating to around 14,000 to 17,000 years ago.

“Dogs were the only domestic animal to predate agriculture, so their evolution can help us understand how a significant change in our lifestyle shaped our own history,” said Dr Pontus Skoglund of the Francis Crick Institute, lead author of the study.

“It is fascinating that dogs living before the age of agriculture contributed substantially to the genetics of today’s herding dogs and European dogs.”

“Dogs were clearly important to our ancestors, as early farmers appear to have adopted ancient hunter-gatherer dogs into their groups as they migrated to Europe.”

In the study, the authors analyzed DNA from 216 canid remains, including 181 samples from before the Neolithic period (about 10,000 years ago), before the invention of agriculture.

These samples came from sites in and around Europe, including Switzerland, Germany, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Turkey, Sweden, Denmark and Scotland.

The researchers used a technique called “capture by hybridization” to increase the amount of usable DNA, by designing probes to “fish” for canid DNA from the large amounts of DNA from microbes like bacteria that tend to contaminate very ancient remains.

The scientists first classified the samples into dogs and wolves by determining how closely each sample resembled a current dog.

Identification as dog or wolf was possible for a remarkable 141 out of 216 remains, with a few surprises.

A 13,700-year-old Belgian canid, previously thought to be a dog due to its small size and traces of human modification, has been identified as a wolf, demonstrating that genetic data is important in confirming conclusions based on the appearance of the remains.

The authors also confirmed that a dog previously proposed from Kesslerloch Cave in Switzerland was genetically a dog.

At 14,200 years old, this dog is the oldest in this study and one of the oldest ever recorded.

Previous research suggested that dogs derived their ancestors from two distinct wolf sources, one from eastern Eurasia and the other from western Eurasia.

Using a statistical model, the researchers showed that all of the early European dogs in this study could trace their origins back to the eastern source of the wolf, with some showing small amounts of ancestry from the western source of the wolf.

This new evidence suggests that European wolves did not contribute detectably to the evolution of dogs and that early European dogs were not domesticated independently of Asian dogs, because the two share the same ancestry profile.

The Kesslerloch dog was genetically more similar to European dogs than to Asian dogs, suggesting that dogs were domesticated well before 14,200 years ago, to allow time for European and Asian dogs to become genetically different at that time.

The spread of agriculture in Europe was accompanied by a large-scale migration of populations from Southwest Asia during the Neolithic period.

By modeling the ancestry of European dogs after the arrival of Neolithic farmers, the team showed that genetic changes in dogs largely reflected changes in human genetics, but to a much lesser extent.

This suggests that dogs from local hunter-gatherer groups already living in Europe contributed substantially to the genetics of dog populations living with Neolithic farmers.

And genetic analyzes of modern European dogs show that they are still largely similar to these Neolithic dogs, implying that the most common European dog breeds could trace about half their ancestry to dogs that lived in Europe before agriculture.

“Without using these advanced genetic tools, we would not be able to confidently distinguish dogs from wolves based on skeletal evidence alone,” said Dr Anders Bergström of the University of East Anglia, first author of the study.

“We would not have been able to provide such a complete picture of their evolution either.”

“As the 14,200-year-old Kesslerloch dog already resembled later dogs of Europe more than those of Asia, the dogs must have been domesticated well before this time, allowing time for these genetic differences to emerge.”

“Yet many questions remain: we are still investigating where and how dogs spread across Europe after probable domestication somewhere in Asia.”

“Each piece of evidence is a step forward in this journey. »

The results were published in the journal Nature.

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A. Bergstrom and others. 2026. Genomic history of the first dogs in Europe. Nature 651, 986-994; doi: 10.1038/s41586-026-10112-7