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Dogs Have Been Man’s Best Friend Even Longer Than We Thought, DNA Shows

New studies reveal the oldest known dog DNA, showing humans had already bonded with canine companions nearly 16,000 years ago.

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For a species that now sleeps on orthopedic memory-foam beds and has its own birthday cake industry, the dog came from pretty feral beginnings. 

According to two new studies published in Nature, the oldest dog DNA ever identified comes from a female puppy that lived roughly 15,800 years ago in Pınarbaşı, in present-day Turkey. That pushes the confirmed genetic record of dogs back by about 5,000 years than we previously thought.

Researchers know dogs came from gray wolves, but narrowing down exactly when wolves became dogs has been a pain point because ancient bones can look frustratingly similar. As Pontus Skoglund of the Francis Crick Institute said, “It’s just an interesting mystery.” That remains true even with major new genetic evidence.

The Oldest Known Dog DNA Shows How Early We Bonded With Dogs

The studies suggest that by at least 14,000 years ago, dogs were already spread across western Eurasia. One 14,300-year-old specimen from Gough’s Cave in southwest England turned out to be genetically close to the Pınarbaşı dog, even though the sites were separated by a huge distance and very different human groups. William Marsh, a lead author quoted by London’s Natural History Museum, called it “a step-change in our understanding of the earliest dogs,” adding that these animals were “already widely dispersed across Europe and Türkiye by at least 14,000 years ago.”

This pushes the bond back into a much earlier chapter of human life. Before farming, before cities, before any of the systems people usually use to explain domestication, dogs were already there. The Pınarbaşı dog was likely a young female puppy, and Laurent Frantz said keeping dogs would have required a lot of effort. That alone suggests they had value beyond simply being nearby.

Before dogs became accessories, social media stars, and tiny “fur babies” in $90 raincoats, they were already close to us. Ancient human life was hard, hungry, and unsentimental. Even then, somebody looked at a wolfish little puppy and said, “Can I keep her?”

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