Science reports:

In the summer of 2004, Douglas Baird was leading excavations at a remote hunter-gatherer site called Pınarbaşı in central Turkey when his team found something unusual: three puppies placed in a pit directly above a human burial. The bones were too small to tell whether they belonged to wolves or dogs. Their proximity to the human suggested the latter, but the remains—dated to about 15,800 years ago—were nearly 5000 years older than any confirmed dog. “Our minds were racing,” says Baird, an archaeologist at the University of Liverpool.

Now, more than 2 decades later, ancient DNA analysis of the bones confirms the pups were indeed dogs, researchers report today in Nature. The study, along with a second paper in Nature, also provides new insight into how dogs spread throughout Europe—and how they may have interacted with ancient humans.

It’s a “supercool” finding, says Natalie Munro, an archaeozoologist at the University of Connecticut who was not involved with either study. “It’s very, very important to have data from this time period. Without it, we can’t talk about the deep history of dogs.”

Despite decades of study, dogs remain one of the greatest mysteries in archaeology. Scientists know they descend from gray wolves, but exactly when this happened—and whether it happened more than once—has been unclear. Until now, the oldest genetically confirmed dog was an 11,000-year-old canine found at a site in northwestern Russia. Archaeologists have unearthed much older suspected dogs—animals whose shorter and wider skulls, for example, are a hallmark of changes that took place as wolves became domesticated. But until now, they did not have the detailed genetic information needed to close the case. [Continue reading…]