Europe’s first domesticated dogs arrived over 3,000 years earlier than we thought
Geneticists are pushing back the date when humans first domesticated dogs in Europe. Using DNA from more than 200 ancient dogs, geneticists have discovered that we domesticated our best friends more than 14,000 years ago. Dogs living in pre-agricultural Europe also contributed substantially to the genetics of those who would live after the rise of agriculture and into the present day. The results are detailed in a study published today in the journal Nature.
“Dogs were the only domestic animal that predated agriculture, so their evolution can help us understand how a great lifestyle change shaped our own history,” Pontus Skoglund, study co-author and geneticist at the Francis Crick Institute, said in a statement.
Old dogs, new technology
Dogs were domesticated from gray wolves between 32,000 and 11,000 years ago, near the end of the most recent ice age. They were the first animals to form a domestic relationship with humans, long before agriculture began. However, scientists still don’t know where and how dogs were first domesticated. Previously, the first direct genetic evidence for dogs dated back only 10,900 years. It has also been difficult to analyze the DNA of the remains of the oldest members of the dog family, called canids, and studying the appearance of the bones does not always help explain how dogs and wolves split.
In this new study, researchers analyzed the DNA of 216 canid skeletal remains. Of these, 181 samples predate the Neolithic period, when agriculture began, around 10,000 years ago. The remains came from sites in Europe and Western Asia, including Switzerland, Germany, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Turkey, Sweden, Denmark and Scotland. To increase the amount of DNA they could use from the bones, the team used a technique called capture hybridization. The technique creates genetic probes capable of detecting canid DNA from microbial DNA that may contaminate very ancient remains.
Through hybridization capture, they identified many early dogs. The oldest in the sample is 14,200 years old and was discovered in the Kesslerloch Cave in Switzerland in 1903. Nicknamed “Maxilla”, it is one of the oldest dogs ever confirmed by genetics, following a 15,800-year-old dog from Turkey.
The 14,200-year-old Kesslerloch dog shared more genetics with European dogs than with Asian dogs. This suggests that dogs were domesticated long before this particular dog was born, due to the time it would have taken for European and Asian dogs to become genetically different.
“Without using these advanced genetic tools, we would not be able to confidently distinguish dogs from wolves based on skeletal evidence alone,” added study co-author Anders Bergström, an evolutionary geneticist from the University of East Anglia and former postdoctoral researcher at the Crick.
The first European farm dogs
The spread of agriculture in Europe was accompanied by a significant migration of people from Southwest Asia. To understand the role that dogs may have played during this transition, the team modeled the ancestry of European dogs as Neolithic farmers arrived on the continent. They found that genetic changes in dogs largely mirrored changes occurring in humans, but to a lesser extent.
Based on their analysis, the team estimates that dogs from local hunter-gatherer groups already living in Europe contributed to the genetics of dog populations already working alongside farmers around 10,000 years ago.
“It is fascinating that dogs living before the age of agriculture contributed substantially to the genetics of today’s herding dogs and European dogs,” Skoglund added. “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.”
Many questions about dog domestication remain, and the team is still researching where and how canines spread across Europe. They think they were probably domesticated somewhere in Asia, and Bergström believes that “each piece of evidence is a step forward on this journey.”
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