Anyone who’s had their shoes eaten might not think dogs are really man’s best friend, but they’re possibly the oldest. A dog skull newly discovered in a Siberian cave is 33,000 years old, and is one of the oldest examples of human domestication of animals known.What’s curious is that the Siberian skull, discovered in the Altai Mountains, is dated to be about as old as a set of dog remains previously discovered in a cave in Belgium. The Siberian and Belgian skulls were confirmed as being domesticated dogs, rather than wolves, thanks to distinct morphological traits.“Both the Belgian find and the Siberian find are domesticated species based on morphological characteristics,” Greg Hodgins, co-author of the paper describing the Siberian skull, said. “Essentially, wolves have long thin snouts and their teeth are not crowded, and domestication results in this shortening of the snout and widening of the jaws and crowding of the teeth.”The large spatial (and small temporal) distance between the two suggests that humans may have domesticated dogs at various times and locations throughout our history. This is contrary to the long-held theory that all domesticated dogs have descended from one common ancestor, as has been suggested by some DNA evidence.“The argument that [the Siberian skull] is domesticated is pretty solid,” Hodgins said. “What’s interesting is that it doesn’t appear to be an ancestor of modern dogs.”Indeed, both the Belgian and Siberian skulls predate the period known as the Last Glacial Maximum, which signifies the period of the last ice age at which Earth’s ice sheets were the most extensive. The LGM occurred between 26,000 and 19,000 years ago, and as you might imagine, was a serious barrier to human migration. It seems that the Belgian and Siberian lineages didn’t survive that period.“In terms of human history, before the last glacial maximum people were living with wolves or canid species in widely separated geographical areas of Euro-Asia, and had been living with them long enough that they were actually changing evolutionarily,” Hodgins said. “And then climate change happened, human habitation patterns changed and those relationships with those particular lineages of animals apparently didn’t survive.”That aside, the skulls may predate human domestication of other species. That’s odd when you think other domesticated animals, like livestock, are geared towards producing food and materials for clothing, but perhaps the benefits of companionship, protection, and help that dogs offer outweighed all that. Or, perhaps domesticating dogs was simply the easiest thing to pull off first. If that’s the case, perhaps dogs were always meant to be our best friends.
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