If the dog is not “man’s best friend”, at least everything indicates that it is the one that has been with us the longest. At least 17,000 years old, as indicated by the oldest bone of these animals found to date, a humerus found in the Erralla cave in Gipuzkoa.
A job of decades. The analysis of the bone culminates a finding that had been decades in the making. It was a team led by the now retired Jesús Altuna who came across the bone in an excavation carried out in the Erralla cave, in the Gipuzkoan municipality of Zestoa, back in 1985. Altuna identified it as a canid bone, without being able to specify the species.
Now, a team of researchers from the University of the Basque Country and the Arkaios archaeozoology laboratory led by Conchi de la Rúa has identified the species to which the bone belonged and its age: it was a canis lupus familiaris, that is, a dog that lived between 17,410 and 17,096 years before the present. This makes it the oldest dog known to date.
uncertain chronology. Little is known about how or when dogs entered the lives of humans. The oldest evidence of the existence of this domesticated animal dates from two sites that overlap in time, one located in Gironde, France (dated between 15,114 and 14,237 years in the past) and another in Bonn-Oberkassel, Germany (dated between 15,114 and 14,237 years ago). between 14,809 and 13,319 years).
However, the researchers already considered before this new finding that the domestication of the dog occurred millennia ago. Although some hypotheses date back to 100,000 years before the present, others consider that domestication would have occurred between 40,000 and 20,000 years ago.
How to analyze a bone. Determining the species to which the bone belonged was not an easy task, as is often the case with biological tissues from this age. Furthermore, our own ignorance of the evolution of dogs and wolves (canis lupus) implies an added difficulty.
The analysis of the Erralla bone, the details of which appear in an article in the magazine Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, studied the bone remains from different perspectives. First, a radiocarbon dating study (the carbon-14 test), which served to date the remains. Secondly, a genetic and morphological study to determine the species to which it belonged.
With this latest double analysis, the team was not only able to determine the species to which the canid owner of the bone belonged. They also traced a genetic link between the animal and the other remains of Magdalenian dogs from France and Germany.
The Lower Magdalenian. The Magdalenian period refers to a Paleolithic culture that happened in Europe that expanded from about 17,000 years ago to about 12,000 years ago. Its development occurred during the Upper Paleolithic and covered various areas of western Europe, such as the coastal regions of the Iberian Peninsula, and the interior of the continent from present-day France to what is now the Czech Republic, probably extending further east.
The era in which the Erralla dog lived was characterized by cold, a fact that could have been closely linked to the domestication of dogs. The glacial maximum had occurred a few millennia earlier, about 22,000 years ago today. The cold would have limited the range of habitable ecosystems for wolves and humans, would have brought them “closer”, facilitating the interaction between both species and thus domestication.
“These results raise the possibility that wolf domestication occurred earlier than previously proposed, at least in Western Europe, where the interaction of Paleolithic hunter-gatherers with wild species, such as wolves, may have been enhanced. in areas of glacial refuge (such as the Franco-Cantabrian) during this period of climate crisis”, De la Rúa points out in a press release.
Rethink domestication. The study gives us some clues about how the process of domestication of dogs could have been. The Erralla animal would have been a contemporary of some wolves with traits already typical of dogs despite being considered a dog itself and not one of these wolves. It will be necessary to discover more remains to clarify how this process was.
Another determining question is whether domestication occurred in one place and spread geographically or if, on the contrary, it occurred at different points in space and time that were converging (the most plausible theory).
The oldest friendship? What does seem to be consolidated with this finding is the hypothesis that the dog is the animal that has been accompanying the human being for the longest time. The time frame precedes by more than 10,000 years the moment in which it is estimated that we domesticated another of the key animals in the development of Eurasian civilizations: the horse.
Be that as it may, the mutualistic relationship between dogs and humans is so old that it may even predate the time when dogs Homo sapiens we are left alone in Europe, older than civilization itself. Undoubtedly a reason to consider when considering our relationship with these animals.
Images | josh frenette, University of the Basque Country