| Dogs became man's best friend far earlier than thought, scientists find Posted by Chris from Nailsea at 19:36, 25th March 2026 |     |
From the BBC:
Dogs became man's best friend far earlier than thought, scientists find
It may not be much to look at but this battered fragment of 9cm bone has transformed the story of dogs and humans
A fragment of a jawbone found deep underground in a cave in Somerset has rewritten the story of when and how dogs became our best friends.
DNA analysis shows the jaw belonged to one of the earliest known domesticated dogs and that people lived closely with them in Britain 15,000 years ago, thousands of years before farm animals were domesticated or cats padded into our homes.
The discovery pushes back the time that the first dogs evolved from their wolf ancestors by around 5,000 years. It also suggests that the friendship between the very first dogs and stone age humans was there almost from the very start, according to Dr William Marsh of the Natural History Museum.
"It shows that by 15,000 years ago dogs and humans already had an incredibly tight, close relationship – and this tiny jawbone, which seems like such a small thing, has helped to unlock the whole human story of how that partnership began."
The first dogs were descendants of grey wolves that lingered around human camps at the end of the Ice Age, scavenging leftovers and slowly becoming tamer.
Over time, people started using these animals to help with hunting, guarding and tracking, turning them into working partners rather than wild predators. After hundreds of generations of human breeding, the dogs that emerged had shorter muzzles, smaller teeth and an enormous range of sizes, from lapdogs to hulking guardians.
Marsh made the discovery by accident during his PhD project. The jawbone was found in excavations from the 1920s in Gough's cave in Cheddar Gorge, now famous for storing its famous cheese.
It had been tucked away in a museum drawer for decades as it was thought to have been an unremarkable specimen. But the young researcher came across an obscure research paper published ten years earlier that raised the possibility it might have belonged to a dog.
Marsh carried out a genetic analysis of the jawbone and found to his shock and delight that it was indeed from a dog, making it the first unambiguous evidence that dogs existed thousands of years earlier than previously confirmed.
Scarcely believing the test results, Marsh told his friend and scientific collaborator Dr Lachie Scarsbrook, from the University of Oxford and LMU Munich, who takes up the story.
"William tells me: 'I found dog from the early stone age,' and I'm like, 'No you haven't — every other dog has been a wolf,' but he's super confident of it. He then shows us his results, and we're like, '(Gosh), this guy might have actually found a dog that far back in time."
Scarsbrook's actual language was more colourful than we can publish, because he knew just how important his friend's big breakthrough could prove.
The dog lived with humans in this Somerset cave 15,000 years ago
With the jawbone from Gough's cave now confidently identified as being from a dog, this allowed its genetic signature to be used to test specimens of a similar age from across western Europe and central Anatolia in modern Turkey, the large Asian peninsula that makes up most of the country. They all turned out to be dogs.
"We've spent years trying to make sense of ancient samples whose DNA sits between wolves and dogs," Scarsbrook told me. "Everything sat in no man's land because we simply couldn't tell where dogs truly began. Then this little jawbone turns up and it is the key to then identifying other ancient dogs all across Europe that had just been sitting under our noses this whole time," he told BBC News.
(BBC article continues)
It may not be much to look at but this battered fragment of 9cm bone has transformed the story of dogs and humans
A fragment of a jawbone found deep underground in a cave in Somerset has rewritten the story of when and how dogs became our best friends.
DNA analysis shows the jaw belonged to one of the earliest known domesticated dogs and that people lived closely with them in Britain 15,000 years ago, thousands of years before farm animals were domesticated or cats padded into our homes.
The discovery pushes back the time that the first dogs evolved from their wolf ancestors by around 5,000 years. It also suggests that the friendship between the very first dogs and stone age humans was there almost from the very start, according to Dr William Marsh of the Natural History Museum.
"It shows that by 15,000 years ago dogs and humans already had an incredibly tight, close relationship – and this tiny jawbone, which seems like such a small thing, has helped to unlock the whole human story of how that partnership began."
The first dogs were descendants of grey wolves that lingered around human camps at the end of the Ice Age, scavenging leftovers and slowly becoming tamer.
Over time, people started using these animals to help with hunting, guarding and tracking, turning them into working partners rather than wild predators. After hundreds of generations of human breeding, the dogs that emerged had shorter muzzles, smaller teeth and an enormous range of sizes, from lapdogs to hulking guardians.
Marsh made the discovery by accident during his PhD project. The jawbone was found in excavations from the 1920s in Gough's cave in Cheddar Gorge, now famous for storing its famous cheese.
It had been tucked away in a museum drawer for decades as it was thought to have been an unremarkable specimen. But the young researcher came across an obscure research paper published ten years earlier that raised the possibility it might have belonged to a dog.
Marsh carried out a genetic analysis of the jawbone and found to his shock and delight that it was indeed from a dog, making it the first unambiguous evidence that dogs existed thousands of years earlier than previously confirmed.
Scarcely believing the test results, Marsh told his friend and scientific collaborator Dr Lachie Scarsbrook, from the University of Oxford and LMU Munich, who takes up the story.
"William tells me: 'I found dog from the early stone age,' and I'm like, 'No you haven't — every other dog has been a wolf,' but he's super confident of it. He then shows us his results, and we're like, '(Gosh), this guy might have actually found a dog that far back in time."
Scarsbrook's actual language was more colourful than we can publish, because he knew just how important his friend's big breakthrough could prove.
The dog lived with humans in this Somerset cave 15,000 years ago
With the jawbone from Gough's cave now confidently identified as being from a dog, this allowed its genetic signature to be used to test specimens of a similar age from across western Europe and central Anatolia in modern Turkey, the large Asian peninsula that makes up most of the country. They all turned out to be dogs.
"We've spent years trying to make sense of ancient samples whose DNA sits between wolves and dogs," Scarsbrook told me. "Everything sat in no man's land because we simply couldn't tell where dogs truly began. Then this little jawbone turns up and it is the key to then identifying other ancient dogs all across Europe that had just been sitting under our noses this whole time," he told BBC News.
(BBC article continues)
