Overview
- Researchers analyzed 643 canid skulls spanning roughly 50,000 years with 3D geometric morphometrics, finding early Holocene dogs already displayed about half of modern cranial variation, though extreme modern shapes are absent.
- The earliest clearly domestic skulls in the dataset come from Veretye in northwest Russia, dated to about 10,800–11,000 years ago.
- A companion paleogenomic study sequenced 17 ancient dogs from Siberia, East Asia and the Central Asian Steppe and compared them with 57 ancient and 160 modern genomes.
- Dog genetic patterns closely tracked human population shifts, including the Early Bronze Age expansion from the Eurasian Steppe into western China that brought people and their dogs together.
- The precise timing and location of initial domestication remain unresolved, and some early skull forms lack matches among living breeds, pointing to vanished lineages.