A look at the history of dogs as our pets

There is archaeological evidence that dogs were the first animals domesticated by humans more than 30,000 years ago, with famous archaeologist and geneticist  Greger Larsongray also describing how wolves were domesticated by humans somewhere in western Eurasia. He surmises that people in the East were also domesticating wolves at the same time.

In 2017, the earliest evidence of dog breeding was found on a remote Siberian Island. The ancient Arctic dwellers i.e. the hunter-gatherers of Zhokhov Island, 9000 years ago may have been the first among humans to breed dogs for a particular purpose. An analysis of the canine bones Zhokhov suggests  that the dogs there were bred to pull sleds. This was the first evidence for dog breeding in archeological records.

“It fills in a missing piece of the puzzle of early human-dog relationships, and even domestication itself,” added Angela Perri, a zooarchaeologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

Also, In a new study published in the journal Science, an international team of scientists sequenced the genomes of 27 ancient dogs, some of which lived up to nearly 11,000 years ago, across Eurasia. “We examined dogs from across the old world, and they represent a period that stretches almost 11,000 years back in time,” said co-author Professor Anna Linderholm, an archaeologist at Texas A&M University.

Dogs were the only animals to be domesticated by the hunter gatherers. The exact timing and cause is however unclear. We have genetic evidence which suggests that dog separated from their wolf ancestor over 20,000 to 40,000 years ago. It isn’t clear whether the domestication happened in Europe or Asia or multiple locations, however findings suggest that during the ice age, hunter gatherers used to have excess meet supply with them. They used to feed it to the wolves, who over time became their pets. They probably adopted the orphaned wolf pups with no long term motive as such, but over time the animals also turned out to be effective hunting partners as in the Zhokhov case, reinforcing their subsequent domestication.

The first recorded domestication of man’s bestfriend has always been a matter of debate and discussion. However, genetic and archaeological records show the remains of the Bonn-Oberkassel dog buried beside humans 14,200 years ago to be the first undisputed dog, with disputed remains occurring 36,000 years ago.