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3w ago

Science Study Finds Much of Dog Diversity Originated Over 11,000 Years Ago

Researchers scanned 643 canid skulls from the past 50,000 years to trace distinct dog-like forms to the early Holocene.

Archaeological canid skull (top) and a modern dog skull (bottom) used for the photogrammetric reconstruction of 3D models in the study.
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Two happy dogs, one large and one small, on a beach.

Overview

  • Distinctive dog skull morphology first appears around 11,000 years ago, aligning with genetic estimates for dog–wolf divergence.
  • Early Holocene dogs already showed about half of today’s skull-shape variation, though extreme modern forms such as pugs and borzois were absent.
  • The earliest clearly domestic specimen in the dataset comes from Veretye in northwest Russia (~10,800 years ago), with early dogs later identified in Illinois (~8,500 years ago) and Asia (~7,500 years ago).
  • Late Pleistocene remains previously proposed as proto-dogs did not exhibit domesticated skull shapes, leaving the earliest domestication phase difficult to detect.
  • A companion Science paper finds dogs traveled with migrating humans after the last glacial period and were sometimes traded between groups.