Meet Dogor. His name means “friend” in the Yakut language, and he is 18,000 years old. He was found in the permafrost of Siberia. Genetic testing shows that the remains of the ancient pup are neither a wolf nor a dog. This means that it could have been an ancestor of both.
The North-Eastern Federal University in Yakutsk says that the remains were found in the summer of 2018 in a frozen patch of ground near the Indigirka River. Some parts of the animal, like its head, nose, whiskers, eyelashes, and mouth, are very well preserved. This shows that the animal still had its baby teeth when it died. Researchers think the animal died when it was only two months old, but they don’t know what killed it.
Researchers at the Centre for Palaeogenetics in Sweden were able to sequence the animal’s DNA using a piece of rib bone because the pup was so well preserved. The results showed that Dogor was a male, but after two rounds of testing, the team was still unable to tell if he was a dog or a wolf.
David Stanton, a research fellow at the Centre for Palaeogenetics, tells CNN’s Amy Woodyatt, “It’s usually pretty easy to tell the difference between the two.” “We already have a lot of information about it, and with that much information, you’d think we could tell which one it was. We can’t tell for sure, but the fact that we can’t might mean that it came from a population that gave rise to both dogs and wolves.
No matter if Dogor is a common ancestor of all dogs, an early dog, or an early wolf, the find is exciting. The Washington Post’s Hannah Knowles says that Dogor comes from an interesting time in the history of dogs, when wolf species were going extinct and early dogs were starting to appear.
Stanton tells Knowles, “As you go back in time and get closer to the point where dogs and wolves meet, it gets harder to tell them apart.
No one knows for sure when and how dogs split from wolves in the past. Scientists agree that gray wolves and dogs split off from a common ancestor between 15,000 and 40,000 years ago, as Brian Handwerk wrote for Smithsonian.com before. But it’s not clear how dogs became dogs. Some research shows that people only domesticated dogs once, while other research shows that this happened more than once. It is also unclear where in the world wild dogs became man’s best friend. The bond between people and animals can be traced back to Mongolia, China, and Europe.
Scientists have different ideas about how dogs came to live with people. Some people think that people took wolf pups and raised them as pets. Some people think that a group of “friendly,” less aggressive wolves became almost domesticated by hanging out near people and eating their leftover food.
The DNA of Dorgor could help figure out these mysteries. Daria Litvinova and Roman Kutuko of the Associated Press say that the team plans to do a third round of DNA testing. This may help them figure out where Dogor fits in the family tree of dogs.
There’s also a chance that scientists will soon have more samples to work with. Sergei Fyodorov, a researcher at North-Eastern Federal University, told the AP that climate change is affecting the Siberian permafrost. This means that more and more ancient animals are being found as the permafrost melts. Mammoth tusks are used instead of elephant ivory in China, which has led to more rare finds in Siberia. In 2016, in the village of Tumat, a 12,400-year-old puppy was found. Its brain, heart, lungs, and stomach were all still in good shape.
George Dvorsky at Gizmodo says that if Dogor is a dog, that would make him the oldest dog ever found. The Bonn-Oberkassel puppy is the oldest dog we know of. Its bones, which are 14,200 years old, were found in a quarry in Germany in 1910, next to what researchers think were the bones of its human friends.
