Early dog skeletons are nearly indistinguishable from those of wolves, which has long frustrated attempts to date domestication. A study in Nature, co-led by LMU palaeogeneticist Laurent Frantz with colleagues at the Natural History Museum in London and the University of Oxford, resolves the question genetically: ancient nuclear DNA confirms that bones from Gough's Cave in Britain, about 14,300 years old, and Pınarbaşı in Türkiye, about 15,800 years old, belonged to dogs.
That pushes the direct genetic evidence for dogs back by more than 5,000 years, placing domestication firmly in the last Ice Age, potentially long before any other domesticated animal or plant. Researchers from 17 institutes compared the ancient genomes with more than 1,000 modern and ancient dogs and wolves, finding that by at least 15,000 years ago dogs with very different ancestries already lived across Eurasia, more closely related to breeds like the Boxer and Saluki than to Arctic huskies.
The human relationship is visible too. Isotope analysis suggests people at Pınarbaşı fed their dogs fish, and at Gough's Cave human funerary practices extended to dogs, pointing to close bonds and cultural significance. The earliest dogs were genetically similar despite living more than 4,000 kilometres apart, implying that hunter-gatherer groups exchanged animals and that dogs dispersed across Europe and Türkiye with striking speed.