Ice Age Siberian Hunters May Have Domesticated Dogs 23,000 Years Ago
That’s the scenario laid out in a new study combining DNA data from ancient dogs and humans.
By David Grimm at Science Magazine Artist: Ettore Mazza
Sometime toward the end of the last ice age, a group of humans armed with stone-tipped spears stalked their prey in the bitter cold of northeastern Siberia, tracking bison and woolly mammoths across a vast, grassy landscape.
Beside them ran wolf-like creatures, more docile than their ancestors and remarkably willing to help their primate companions hunt down prey and drag it back to camp.
These were the world’s first dogs. Their descendants flowed both west and east, populating
Eurasia as well as accompanying the ancestors of Native Americans as they spread into the Americas...
