Genetic evidence of both humans and dogs, published earlier this year by Perri and colleagues, suggest that they left Eurasia together as people and their pooches crossed the Bering Land Bridge to the ancient Americas together. No one knows for sure exactly how the two species started their relationship, with the leading hypothesis being that the friendlier wolves got used to people who gave them scraps or let them raid garbage piles, but that was the crucible in which the first domesticated dogs were born.įrom there, the history of people and dogs was intertwined. Around 23,000 years ago, in what’s now Siberia, humans and gray wolves were hemmed in by the encroaching glaciers of the last Ice Age. The bone fragment, held here by study coauthor Flavio Augusto da Silva Coelho, is very small.ĭogs have been with humans for a very long time. The more ancient DNA that’s recovered, analyzed and placed in the database, the bigger the sample researchers have to work from when trying to understand how organisms-be it dogs or humans- relate to each other. Advances in how ancient DNA is extracted, corrected for any modern contaminants and sequenced have allowed researchers to quickly assess the genetics of organisms much faster than ever before, building a growing database that can be used to detect broader patterns. “This is a nice example of what can be done with some of these advanced methods,” she adds, noting that mass screening of archaeological material can turn up new clues that might otherwise be missed. “Ten or twenty years ago, we would have looked through a pile of bone fragments and not seen this,” says Durham University archaeologist Angela Perri, who was not involved in the new study. But when Lindqvist and colleagues analyzed the DNA extracted from the bone, they found something very different. Perhaps the DNA would reveal what sort of bear the bone came from and how it was related to other ursids. While looking for Ice Age bear bones to examine, University of Buffalo geneticist Charlotte Lindqvist set about analyzing PP-00128. The surprising realization was published today in a study in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The sliver did not belong to a bear, but at 10,150 years old, the most ancient dog yet found in the Americas. But ancient DNA evidence has given this unassuming shard of bone a new identity. Known to experts as PP-00128, the fragment of bone found in a southeastern Alaskan cave seemed to be from some large mammal that lived in the area thousands of years ago. For more than a decade, archaeologists thought they were looking at a bear.
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