Dog domestication may have started 28,000 years ago

I thought about the Mahdi

Over the millennia, humans believed that a gradual series of changes had transformed a wild animal into a docile pet, but how, why, and when did this process begin? The matter is still under discussion in the scientific community.

A recent study - published in the 115th issue of the "Journal of Archaeological Science" for the current year - conducted in an archaeological site in the Czech Republic, showed that the fossil bones recently discovered there belonged to dogs that had lived 28,500 years ago.

This disclosure can show one of the first stages of animal husbandry, or it can be traced back to ancient wolves as well, especially as the breed of dogs descends from the Eurasian gray wolf breed.

Broken teeth
To this day, it is difficult for researchers to distinguish between the bones of dogs and their wild animal counterparts when studying fossil bone discoveries, when it comes to comparing them with the fossils of their ancestors.

However, many studies conducted in this regard confirmed that the rate of dental fractures is higher in dogs compared to wolves. That is why a team of researchers from America, Belgium, and the Czech Republic adopted a different method this time to study fossil bones that had recently been discovered in an archaeological site in the Czech Republic.

Their observations centered on cranial crania, the shape of teeth, and search for fractures in the structure of the fossil bone discovered. They considered that the method of tooth erosion is but a behavioral sign that can appear for generations before morphological changes occur in the clan itself.

The limits of human settlements
Indeed, the researchers compared the new fossil bones that are likely to belong to old dogs that had inhabited that archaeological site with fossils that had been discovered before and attributed to a family of wolves that inhabited the same site 28,500 years ago.

The researchers recorded marked differences in the breakers of both types. They found scars on the teeth of the suspected old dogs, and they were larger than just poetic caries such as those found on the fossil bones of the Pleistocene wolf (from the sixth geological period).

Which indicates that she had followed a diet containing harsh foods, such as bones. This discovery coincides with the idea that the coexistence of old dogs and humans began on the borders of human settlements, there where it was forced to feed on the remains of human food, including bones.

Seasonal migration
Some question this theory of domestication and see that these observations in the teeth can be explained on the basis of the migration of these two species of wolves that are distinguished in form and behavioral to that land on a seasonal basis, based on their presentation of this on what we see from the behavior of wolves groups today.

In other words, she may have changed her nutritional behavior in response to environmental change and not necessarily that she was already domesticated.

However, the new study shows that there are many suspicious differences between these two species in the period in which humans colonized that site permanently, which may already indicate a behavioral shift in wolves towards domestication.

Of course, further research is required to verify the results of this research by conducting additional studies in Central Europe, which is home to the largest fossil record of ancient dogs.

The research may also include other regions of the world, especially those that are known to have seen domestication of dogs in them. This study introduces a new approach using the archaeological record to distinguish old dog fossils from wolves.