According to new research, humans domesticated dogs thousands of years earlier than previously thought.
Analyzes of dog bones in Alaska suggest that humans and dogs lived together much earlier than previously thought: around 10,000 BC.
The bones contained traces of salmon proteins, suggesting that canines regularly ate fish that must have been caught by humans – a sign of domestication.
Researchers from the University of Arizona found a 12,000-year-old lower leg bone belonging to an adult wolf-sized dog at an archaeological site called Swan Point, about 70 miles southeast of Fairbanks.
Swan Point is one of several sites in the area that contain some of the oldest evidence of human habitation in the state.
This ancient dog lived near the end of the Ice Age, suggesting that native Alaskans formed relationships with dogs some 2,000 years earlier than previous studies had shown.
The researchers believe this recovered leg bone helps establish the earliest known close relationships between humans and dogs in the Americas.
Additionally, the team found an 8,100-year-old dog jawbone at the nearby excavation site on Hollembaek Hill south of Delta Junction, providing evidence for the continued presence of domesticated dogs in human settlements.
Researchers unearthed this 8,100-year-old dog jawbone (above) in interior Alaska in June 2023. The bone is some of the earliest evidence that the ancestors of today’s dogs formed close relationships with humans in the Americas about 2,000 years earlier than previously thought.
“People like me who are interested in the population of the Americas are very interested to know whether those first Americans came with dogs,” said lead study author François Lanoë, an assistant research professor of anthropology at the University of Arizona.
“Until you find those animals in archaeological sites, we can speculate about them, but that’s hard to prove one way or another.”
But Lanoë and his colleagues’ research has finally brought that missing evidence to light.
“We now have evidence that canines and humans had close relationships before we knew they did in the Americas,” Lanoë said.
Chemical analysis showed that the bones contained salmon proteins, indicating that the dogs had regularly eaten fish.
This was surprising because the canines hunted only terrestrial animals in this area and during this period.
The most logical explanation is therefore that the dog was fed fish caught by humans, the researchers concluded.
“This is the smoking gun, because they don’t really hunt salmon in the wild,” said co-author Ben Potter, an archaeologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
Pictured above, the excavation site known as ‘Hollembaek Hill’, south of Delta Junction in Alaska, where the ancient dog jawbone was unearthed. Archaeologists have long conducted research in collaboration with local tribes in this Delta Junction area
The jawbone and this leg bone found in Swan Point, Alaska (seen above in a composite scan) both showed chemical evidence of salmon proteins in laboratory tests – a discovery that led the team to conclude that ancient humans had probably fed the fish by the canines. who did not hunt fish in the wild
But both Lanoë and Potter noted that this evidence, while compelling indicators of when dogs were first domesticated, is still far from a solid timeline.
“It asks the existential question: What is a dog?” as Potter put it.
These gentle, salmon-eating canines, Lanoë said, may still be closer to domesticated wolves than a truly early example of the kind of uniquely bred and domesticated dogs that modern humans might recognize.
Above, an image of François Lanoë, an assistant research professor at the University of Arizona’s School of Anthropology, after helping unearth the dog’s 8,100-year-old jawbone in June 2023
The researcher noted that this evidence – while compelling indicators of when dogs were first domesticated – is still far from a solid official timeline. Above is an illustration of an early American traveling with his canine companion
“Behaviorally they resemble dogs,” says Lanoë, “but genetically they have nothing to do with what we know.”
To excavate the Hollembaek Hill site, the research team worked closely with the Healy Lake Village Council, the leadership group for the Mendas Cha’ag people who are indigenous to the area.
Evelynn Combs, a local Healy Lake resident who is now an archaeologist herself, assisted with the research as part of her work for the tribe’s cultural preservation office.
Combs spent her childhood exploring the village and the surrounding Tanana Valley with her own dog Rosebud, a Labrador retriever mix. She marveled at how the new finds give greater historical context to the traditions she lived in her own life.
“I really like the idea that no matter how long ago, it’s a repeatable cultural experience that I have this relationship and this level of love with my dog,” Combs said.
“I know that these relationships have always been present throughout history,” she continued. “I think it’s really great that we can look at the record and see that we still had our companions thousands of years ago.”