Overview
- Two peer-reviewed Nature studies reconstructed genomes from Ice Age canid bones and identified a 15,800-year-old puppy from Pınarbaşı, Turkey, as the oldest confirmed dog.
- Dogs from Turkey and Britain were almost genetically identical, which points to one western Eurasian dog population rather than a separate European domestication.
- Burial practices and bone chemistry show close human–dog ties, with pups buried like people and diets that matched local humans, including fish at Pınarbaşı.
- When farmers spread from southwest Asia into Europe about 8,500 to 8,000 years ago, their dogs interbred with local hunter-gatherer dogs, and that older ancestry persists in many European breeds.
- Researchers still have not found the source wolf population or the exact start of domestication, and early genetic diversity suggests it began several millennia before these Late Ice Age dogs.