The Ancients - Britain's First Dog

Episode Date: April 2, 2026

Fifteen thousand years ago, as the Ice Age loosened its grip on Northern Europe, humans returned to the previously inhospitable British Isles. But they did not come alone. Among their number was a companion once thought to be an impossibility: Britain's earliest known dog.In this episode of The Ancients, Tristan Hughes Dr. Selina Brace and Dr. William Marsh from the Natural History Museum to explore groundbreaking new research from Gough’s Cave that is reshaping our understanding of humans and dogs in Ice Age Britain. Together they uncover the story of a remarkable discovery: ancient remains once believed to belong to a wolf, now identified as Britain’s oldest known domesticated dog. How did this dog live alongside prehistoric hunter-gatherers? And how is this discovery changing what we thought we knew about the arrival of dogs in Britain?MOREThe First Dogs:Listen on AppleListen on Spotify End of the Ice Age Britain:Listen on AppleListen on Spotify Presented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Aidan Lonergan. The producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music courtesy of Epidemic SoundsThe Ancients is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe. Hello and welcome to a very special episode of The Ancients where we're doing some breaking news. You might have seen very recently. It's been announced that Britain's earliest known dog has been discovered some 15,000 years ago. It was living in Goff's Cave, in Cheddar Gorge. Now, I've got my own dog right next to me at the moment. We've got Gummer. He's being a menace, as always, this lovely Spaniel.

And yes, Gummer, today we're talking about your 15,000. year old Ice Age ancestor, Britain's first dog. Today we've got on the show two of the authors of that brand new paper. We've got Dr. William Marsh and Dr. Salina Brace. And thereon to tell you all about this brand new discovery and the amazing world it's opening up. And a world of Ice Age dogs in Britain in Western Europe. Let's go. Good point.

The Ice Age. An Age of Megafauna. glacial landscapes and our prehistoric hunter-gatherer ancestors. In Britain, 15,000 years ago, much of the landmass had been uninhabitable, covered in either ice or tundra wasteland. But things were changing, the climate was warming, and life was returning. First came the herds of deer, horse and mammoth, crossing the great land bridge that at that at that time connected Britain with Europe, and then came again.

humans following the herds northwards. But these early groups, they didn't return on their own, they also brought dogs. We now know this for sure, thanks to brand new research on remains found at Goff's Cave in Somerset, remains thought by researchers to belong to a wild wolf, but in fact belonged to a domesticated dog. So what has this research revealed about Britain's newest Ice Age pooch, how close a relationship did it have with the humans that also occupied Goff's cave 15,000 years ago, both during its life and after its death? This is the breaking news story of Britain's first known doc, and what we know so far, with researchers Dr. William Marsh and Dr. Selina Brace.

Selina, William, it is great to have you both on the podcast. Welcome to the show. Thanks for inviting us. It's lovely to be here. Yeah, thanks, Strishan. Thanks having us. You guys are more than welcome, especially for this. It feels like a breaking news story. The fact that Britain's oldest dog, or should we say, earliest known dog, is some 15,000 years old. Selena, it's great. I think that definitely constitutes as an exceptionally good work day when you realize that we've managed to sequence Britain's oldest dog, that's for sure. And how much of a surprise was it to make this discovery?

Well, kind of yes and no. Yes, it's always a surprise. You know, we're working with ancient fragmented DNA. So we're always relieved when it works, when you get a result. But should we have been surprised? Well, we've been working on the site for a number of years, so we know that the DNA actually has very good preservation there. And we've also known that it was quite likely that dogs existed there. So the clues were already there, but it took a little while for the genetics and the genetic capabilities to catch up.

So yeah, for everything to align as well as it did, yeah, that's always a good surprise. I remember vividly the moment when I saw the initial DNA results, and I think it was an expletive-ridden response to seeing the fact that, yes, we had, first of all, very, very good DNA preservation from this specimen.

but secondly, that it was a dog. Because there's been a sort of, lots of academic focus on Goff's Cave the site over the last 30, 40 years. And this particular specimen was sampled back in the early 2000 for DNA analysis. But our methods were so unadvanced at that point.

It just didn't work. And then in 2010, we had some other colleagues of a museum, looked at it, looked at the morphology of it, and found that it was very, very small compared to other wolves. and Vade in a very, very niche text said perhaps this is an example of a domestic dog.

But the only true sort of empirical way to know this is through DNA analysis. And we did a de-analysis in, yeah, 223, 2024. It's part of my PhD. And, yeah, it's all come from there, really. I also love this story because William and Selena, I've met you both before. We've done stuff on this site, Gough's Cave that we're going to get into in a bit. But it's a lovely story how, Selina, I've done interviews with you in the past. You are such an expert in the DNA field, whether it's cheddar man, skeletons at Stonehenge and so on.

And William, of course, you know, this is your PhD and you've got a background in it as well. To see you both working together on this project is lovely. So you guys are quite a team in making these discoveries. Yeah, we've been really lucky to work together for a number of years now. So getting to work on Goss Caves for so long has been incredibly special. Yeah, I first heard about ancient DNA, the field, from a talk which Selena gave to me in 2019. And from there, we've been tired of a hip. You've got to get rid of me now.

No, never. I also think in today's age, the fact that the first words out of your mouth was an expletive and not a eureka or a blimey or golly. I think that emphasizes once again just the significance of the discovery because I think you're quite right to have an expletive as the first word. Maybe it tells you more about me as a person, perhaps. So, Selena, we've mentioned it already now, Goff's Cave. So what is this location that, as you've already mentioned, you know, people have known a lot about it for quite some time? Yeah, yeah.

So although we first saw the dog in the NHM collections, the dog was initially found in Goff's Cave, in Cheddar George in Somerset. So as I've said, we've worked on Cheddar Gorge for a number of years now. It's an amazing site. It's a limestone cave that people can go and visit, go and see. It's got these amazing stalagmites. But it's also been, as you mentioned, an absolute treasure trove for significant archaeological finds over the years. So the cave itself, the particular assemblage, the group of bones and material that we're talking about now, where this dog has been found, dates to around the period of around 15,000 years. So this is a period of around 15,000 years. So this is a period of, of climate warming. So this is after the end of the last ice age, so when Britain would have been covered by ice sheets. At this point at 15,000 years, the ice sheets would have been retreating and plants and animals would have been recolonising Britain and humans also returning

at this time point and they would have been occupying this cave. Probably as kind of seasonal, it wasn't like they necessarily lived there. It was more like people were going to the cavego as a seasonal thing, either perhaps to meet or for feasts. We don't know exactly, of course, but they were certainly occupying this cave at different periods during this time, 15,000 years ago. And is this a time period then? So after one of the coldest periods in Ice Age history, the last glacial maximum, a period when it's believed that humans left Britain altogether, but at some 15,000 years ago, so around

that time, is evidence of. small groups of humans coming back and a site like Goff's Cave is one of the greatest cave sites in the area, maybe even in Southern Britain, where people can live for small amounts of time? Yeah, I would say so. So at around 20,000 years,

which is when glaciation was at its peak, human and formal animal populations, plant populations couldn't inhabit these northern latitudes. So I think it's like the whole of Denmark from north of maybe Birmingham was all covered in ice sheets.

And for another 200, 300 miles south, we'd all be completely uninhabitable. So human populations were restricted to these glacier refuges in two main glacier refuges in Europe at the time. One was sort of the Italy Balkans region, and one was in southern France and northern Spain. And these individuals who we find at Goss Cave are called a Magdalenean. And they stem from this refugia in southern France and northern Spain. So essentially as the ice sheets retreated, these groups of small hunter-gatherers dependent on hunting terrestrial fauna, so wild horses, reindeer, things like that,

their prey essentially would have been moving northwards and they would have been tracking with prey northwards. And we see an increase of these Magdalenean sites across northern Europe, across Germany, across Poland, between about 18,000 and 15,000. but the one at the assemblage at Goff's Cave is one of the largest and one of the most rich in terms of not only human remains but also artefacts and lithic technologies and we have this incredible funerary behaviour of funerary cannibalism so rather than burying their dead as we might do or cremate their dead they were eating eating their dead all right don't don't reveal too much too quickly there william we're going to get to that especially with the story but i've jumped ahead

No, you have not. You have teased what is to come with the story. But it's a fascinating example, isn't it, of humans coming back, of living in these caves, an amazing glimpse into life in Britain in the last few thousand years of the Ice Age. So let's go to the dog remains. Selina, how much of the dog was discovered? How many remains do you have, or did you guys have to learn to make this research? Okay, so there is an awful lot of fragmented. bone material at this site. There's loads of animal bone and remains and many of these can't actually even be morphologically identified. So we know that there's a lot of different so canad remains. So these could be morphologically identified as belonging to the canid family, so either dog or wolf.

But the particular sample that we're talking about today, the one that we've done this all this genetic work on is actually a mandible. So this is the dog's lower jaw and it was complete also with teeth. So the dog mandible was found as part of this Paleolithic assemblage. So this human remains, but these animal rains and lithics or tools that we know come from this Paleolithic period. They found this undisturbed sediment that had been protected by a fallen block near the cave entrance. and it's within this material that this mandible was found and had then been donated to the Natural History Museum. So it's a cave that it's a site and an assemblage that contains lots of different types of material, so human and animal. And so you have the remains of this dog, you have the mandible, and you mentioned earlier how with advancements in technology that were able to learn more about it and DNA and so on.

So William, what methods did you guys have to garner as much information? as possible from this mandible with teeth on its as well. So we had three main biomolecular methods is what we call them. So the first is obviously ancient DNA, which is what Celina and I specialize in. We also have perhaps the most important method, which is radiocarbon dating. So this is measuring the isotopic value of carbon 14 in the collagen. And essentially, once the individual is deposited, the carbon 14 is, and radioactive isotope.

So it begins to degrade. So it has a half-life, I think it's of like 720 years or something like that. So essentially you can track the proportion of carbon 14 to carbon 13, and that tells you the age, you can predict the age of an element. And we did that for this mandible at Goff's Cave, and it came out as about 14,500 years old, which is very similar, or almost completely identical, let's say,

to all the human remains, which had also been sample of radiocarbon dating, and also some faunal remains. So we have a very, very tight sort of age range from about 15.1,000 years ago to 14.2,000 years ago, where we know that these Magellanian groups were using Goscave. And alongside the third method is called dietary isotope analysis,

so this gives you an insight into what humans and dogs were eating. based on their carbon and nitrogen values. I must ask, because I saw these words in your paper, and they just intrigued me. Selena, how do the words nuclear genome data fit into this? Okay, so nuclear genome data, this is basically the DNA. This is the DNA, not of the mitochondrial genome, which is a very small genome,

but the nuclear DNA is basically your DNA instruction manual. it's what tells the cells to make either a person a person or in this case dog a dog. So it gives all dogs the same characteristics that makes them dogs, but it's also what makes a Great Dane different from a poodle and every spaniel diff, sort of slightly different from every other spaniel, if you know what I mean. It's the bits that make you the same and it's the bits that make you different, all encoded in our nuclear DNA. And so as we go on to a bit more about the dog itself,

one last question on the context. You mentioned how obviously this dog mandible is not found in isolation, these other remains human and faunal dating to around 15,000 years ago in Goff's Cave. Just to summarize, so we have the best possible context, the best possible idea of how many different types of remains we have alongside the dog. Can you explain to us, Celina, what we do have from Goff's Cave from some 15,000 years ago alongside this mandible? Yeah, so there are a lot of other bones at this side. So we have both herbivores and carnivores. So these include things like red deer, horse, and auroch, which is like a large extinct cattle. And these remains have often been butchered by humans. So you see signs of cut marks and defleshing. There's also human artifacts at this site. So we have things such as perforated batons, which are these like deer antlers with holes in them. And you have needles, you have napping tools. So These are the things that people use to like shape stone.

And of course, we have a really cool engraved human arm bone. This engraved, it's beautifully artistically engraved with this zigzag pattern. Very, very cool. But of course, we also have these human remains at the site as well. And the human remains are highly fragmented. We have over 200 small fragments of people, but perhaps what was most exciting, about, almost interesting about these people, is that most of them have signs of post-mortem human modification. So these are, this is our way of saying it looks like these people were

cannibalized, okay? So for the faint-hearted amongst us, you know, blogger ears now, but we do see that they have cut marks, they have human teeth marks, chew marks, scraping marks. So, yeah, very clearly, these are the remains of people who have been eaten by other people. But we also find these very cool cranial vaults. So this is where the skull caps have been very carefully removed and modified into what have been interpreted as like skull cups or sort of skull cups. So these were found alongside the animal remains and of course what we now know to be a dog. And we see examples.

Although at Goss Cave is exception and how large it is, in terms of the amount of material which we have, lithics, formal remains, human remains, you actually see other examples of these cannibalistic behaviours across the Magdalenean across Europe. So I think there's 13 sites where you see this cannibalism, six which have skull cups. So it shows that Goffs Cave was obviously a unique site in itself,

but also linked to the sort of wider population across content of Europe at the time. And just to clarify that, mentioned it earlier as well, William. So when we say lithic, do we mean kind of stone tool technology? Yeah, stone tools. And these stone tools technologies would be sort of, although unique is probably not the right word, but idiosyncratic of the Magdalaneans. So the Magdalans would have their own sort of type of lithic or stone tool technologies compared to other Hunter Gavra groups, other Hunter Gavra cultures of the same theory. So let's get on to the dog itself. William, when you were doing

this research alongside Selena, how did you find out that this mandible belonged to a dog and not a wolf? Because surely that it's quite difficult to distinguish between the two and the bones when the remains of some 15,000 years old. Yeah, it was pretty tricky, to be honest. And what we had to do is essentially drill a hole in the bone, get some bone powder, extract the DNA from his bone powder, and then sequences from very, very large and expensive DNA sequencing machines. The thing about ancient DNA is that it's very, very fragmented. So if I was to take a drop of your blood Tristan now, it would have more DNA in it than probably 500 samples at the Natural History Museum.

And not only would that you would have more of it, more of your own DNA, but also it would be very, very long compared to the ancient DNA in these samples. Because as when Individuville dies, the DNA begins to break down, gets very, very shorter, and gets more and more damaged. So that's what we're having to deal with when we're talking about ancient DNA. Because it's 15,000 years ago, that degradation has occurred for a very, very long period. So, yes, we had to do a lot of very specialist lab methods that draw out these very, very small DNA fragments. But once we had the DNA, once we had enough of the DNA, it's actually fairly straightforward to run the analyses. because grey wolves, which is the wild version of a dog, essentially,

all dogs derive from a grey wolf population. They are genetically very, very distinct from a dog population. So once you have the DNA, you can run a very, very simple test, essentially comparing the DNA of our sample with a modern dog and a modern wolf. And in our case, our sample was far more similar to the dog than it was to the grey wolf. And at that point, that was the eureka moment. Selina, am I correct to that? I mean, do we know much about wolves 15,000 years ago as well?

Am I correct that there is also a wolf discovered in Goffs Cave alongside the dog? Yeah, so there were wolves also around at this time point. And as I said, that we have lots of fragmentary canad remains at the Goffs Cave site, even within this assemblage. So we have looked at several of those to see if we could identify genetically more dogs from the site. there is a tantalizing, tantalizingly so that there is another dog there, but the DNA isn't as well preserved. But we can definitely say that one of the other kind of remains that we looked at is in fact a wolf. So, yeah, so morphologically, the less amount of material that you find, the harder it is to distinguish between the two just by looking at the bones. Because, of course, you're just looking at the size.

And if you don't have a big enough fragment, you can't tell. And that's where the DNA comes in. Because I would say, you know, what is amazing is that, yes, there's all these millions of parts of the genome that look different in dogs and wolves. And if you look at dogs and wolves today, they are different species. So yes, of course you'd expect these millions of things. But the fact that we see these in this dog for 15,000 years ago, it's amazing that that's still the case. You know, it's brilliant. Yeah, really cool.

One might think we were so, we're getting closer and closer to the, time dogs were domesticated. One might think at this point, dogs and wolves were genetically more similar, but not really. We see the same distinction 15,000 years ago as we do today between dogs and wolves, which is quite remarkable. Yeah, I completely agree. It's just, it's just amazing. They are actually already that different. So, you know, to put it into another context, what it means is these Paleolithic dogs are already more similar to modern dogs, you know, Fido at home, than they are to these ancient wolves from the same time. That kind of like blew my mind, to be honest. Yeah, it's crazy. I mean, this was what I was wanting

us to get towards was the fact that if you've got a wolf, evidence of a wolf at Goff's Cave, at the same time that you've got evidence of a dog in these humans populations, to try and get in our mind how similar this Ice Age dog and that Ice Age Wolf would have been, how to distinguish. distinguishable they would have been to these human peoples at that time. But from what you guys are saying, actually yes, there would have been clear differences between the two. Yeah, but probably, like, it's hard to know

what the dog would have looked like. Probably very, very similar to wolf. But behaviourally, it probably would have been behaving in a very, very different manner to the wolf. I hope it was behaving differently, William. Well, I say, might have had a bit of a problem. You would have already seen this,

yeah, genetically, divergence, not much breeding between grey wolf and dog populations, but perhaps the greatest barrier to gene flow, so this is breeding between the two species, would have been the dog's association with these humans. Essentially, such a strong barrier that if a dog was to mate with a grey wolf, it's highly likely that that hybrid individual would have, A, been probably too aggressive to be associated with the humans at the time, but B, also not be accepted. within the grey wolf populations, within the grey wolf pack,

so would have almost certainly not have reproduced. And it's that really strong barrier to genetic drift, which probably what initially caused that divergence between wolves and dogs. But going back to something which Selena says, a little bit more off topic here, there's been so many claims of dogs in the Paleithic, usually based on morphology. So I think that one of the earliest claims was 36,000 years ago,

from a site in Goya Cave so this is a site in Belgium and these researchers were completely convinced that this canad was a dog based on morphology based on its deposition environment but our collaborators over at Oxford

did the DNA on it it turns out it's just an extinct population of grey wolves it's very wolfy and there are 10 or 12 examples of more recent so 36, 32 30,000 20,000 28,000 of these dogs, which when you do the de-analysis, they just come out with the wolves.

They are essentially wolves. So actually finding a dog this old has been tried many, many times before, and we were very fortunate to be the first people to actually have cracked it. I'm sorry to go a bit into theory here now, because I think this is probably something that we can't figure out even from the surviving evidence. But could we assume then, like the dog with the people at Goff's Cave was obviously a dog that lived with the people, you know, wasn't too aggressive with them, was part of almost, we could think the community, like a modern dog, but the wolf at Goff's Cave, although dating

to a similar time period, just what we know from, you know, behaviourally and DNA and the fact that it's a wolf, was this clearly, you know, this was a wild animal, this could have been hunted by the human population, or it could have just been living at the cave at a different time. It wouldn't have been part of that small human group, Salina. Yeah, that's correct. I think that's the assumption that we would make from this. I mean, you do not see signs of modification of the wolf. So the wolf, sorry, has not been butchered.

The wolf, we see no signs of any kind of modification in that way. And also, as we say, this is that the people at Goss Cave were likely occupying the cave seasonally. They weren't there all the time. So it's more likely perhaps that this wolf was coming in, even at a completely different time point to the humans. We can't say for sure, obviously. Our radio carbon dating isn't that good to put it down to very precise states. But one could imagine that this cave was being used by wild animals,

animals were scavenging in there, as well as humans using it as a butchery site. We can't really tease it apart, but it seems more likely that it would have been a separate occasion that this wolf would have entered the cave. What's interesting here is that the grey wolves would have been, hunting the same thing as the humans would have been hunting. So they would have been tracking the reindeer as they seasoning migrated around. The humans would have been tracking them, but so would have the great walls. Same place, same time. No direct association, but almost certainly in competition to a degree with one another. We've already talked about from the data that you've gathered from

this dog mandible, how it's revealed the age of the dog, the closeness to modern dogs compared to wolves. But Selena, what other information about this dog have you been able to gather? Have you been able to ascertain from the surviving mandible? So yeah, we sort of like hinted at this a little bit earlier and this is actually the isotopic data that we use to look at the wolf. And as William says, this is about, this tells us about diet. We've used it a lot more in the past in sort of like archaeological studies to assess past human diets. Because as we said, this is looking at those differences in carbon and nitrogen. Nitrogen in particular tells us about tropic level. So the position that an animal occupies in the food train. So like a high level

carnivore versus a mid-level omnivore versus a low-level sort of herbivore. So yeah, yeah, This kind of analysis doesn't actually provide us with a menu card of like their last supper or anything like that, but it does allow us to compare the values across different species. And in this case, we were able to look at the nitrogen values from both the human remains at the site and the animal and the dog remains at the site. And when we looked at this, we see that there are these dietary similarities across the dogs and the humans and that they have a very similar diet and this similar degree of omnivory. So obviously what we kind of like, what one draws from this is there's a possibility they were sharing the same diet as in the humans were potentially feeding the dogs, the same things that they were eating, which is really exciting. I have to add, because we're scientists and that's what we do, there is a tiny caveat with this in that it isn't quite as clear cut as that thing, definitive, because when we looked at that

wolf, you remember we had that wolf at the cave as well, they also show a very similar value. So it's not quite as clear as they are exactly, you know, just exclusively showing their dinner, but it does still very much point to shared lives and this closeness and a close bond between them as well. William, I remember doing an interview with Dr. Angela Perry a couple of years ago on like the earliest dogs and the importance of leftovers in the story of dog domestication. And we'll put a link in the description to our chat with Angela, Dr. Angela, Dr. Angela Perry as well about that, where she explores more about that. But we'll get stock domestication in a bit. But could we imagine a scenario where these people in Goss Cave, as Salina says it's not completely clear, but they were having their dinner and then what they didn't eat, the leftovers were given to the dog. in their community.

We're given to the dog in Goff's Cave at that time. Yeah, yeah. That's almost certainly a possibility. And I don't really want to muddy the waters here, but I am going to. I'm going to bring in another site from the same study which we've been, in which we've analyzed this Goff Cave dog, another site in Turkey. So this is very, very similar age. You have a dog here, genetically identified dog.

You also have humans. Now the humans at this point were very different to the maglains at Goff's Cave. They were eating fish. They were eating cereals. When we run the same analyses on these dogs at this Pina Bashi site, this Turkish site, we find that both humans and dogs have elevated nitrogen values indicating they were eating fish. So whilst at Goss Cave, it's trickier to say that at Pinnabashi, this other site where we found another very, very, very old dog. it is almost certainly that these dogs were being either directly or indirectly given fish to eat by the humans.

And these are not big fish, these are small little sort of roaches, minnow type things which you find all across the site. So yeah, as Angela says, almost certainly a possibility of how they were being fed, either directly or indirectly. But that is amazing. That's one of the things that makes this research, no doubt why it's so popular when you guys announced it to the world. this relatable nature of it, the fact that we're going back to the Ice Age, we're talking about dogs, we're talking about a community feeding their dog as well. And it's not just this idea of an ancient prehistoric dog being used for a practical purpose for hunting to benefit the community, the fact that we're getting insights into that kind of close, bonded nature that so many of us still have with dogs today. Yeah, I agree. They probably were used for hunting,

or centuries, almost certainly, but they were not completely euteritarian. There is a symbolic relationship here, which we get from the isotopes, but also this other sort of post-mortem relationship, you see between the dogs at Goff's Cave and the humans at Goff's Cave. As Selena said earlier,

we have this post-mortem modification of human remains. We also find that on the dog as well. You guys are so great at teeing up what I was about to ask next. So yes, what happened to this dog? Okay, well, obviously we don't know exactly what happens this dog, this dog died. It is quite likely that this dog would have been used by the humans in life and in death. So it's possible that this dog would have been eaten by the humans. It would have had a nutritional function for them. This is the Paleolithic after all. You have to make use of the resources that you have. But, there is more. It isn't just basic nutritional requirement associated with this dog because we also see these post-mortem modifications. There's aspects of this mandible that were treated after the animal had died by the humans, one would assume that they're human companions. And this is that they actually make a hole in the mandible. And this is important. Why waste time energy doing this if this animal to you

did not have some significance. They make a perforation in it for what we don't know for sure. One can imagine lots of different ways they may have used that or why, but the fact is that they actually do something with these remains more akin to a ritual modification rather than it being a basic nutritional requirement for food. And that is, I think, what sets apart this bone and the dog to the other animal remains at the site. Definitely. And we actually also see very similar treatment at this Turkish site I mentioned previously. So the humans are completely different. Rather than eating their dead, they do something which in our mind is probably far more sensible. They bury their dead. But alongside these human burials, you actually find dog burials as well.

So at Goff's Cave and at Pinnabashi, you've got two completely different human groups behaving very, very differently. But they appear to be treating their dogs in the same manner, same symbolic manner at each site, dependent on whichever culture they're with. And alongside this as well. So once we've done the DNA analysis of this individual from Goss Cave and also at Pinnabasi, it's sort of,

I hate using one of my close collaborators' praises here, but it was essentially the Rosetta Stone. It allowed us to look back at other samples for which we had very, very poor DNA preservation for and see, okay, now we have a dog from Goss Cave, now we have a dog from Pinnabashi. is anything that these data can tell us about other potential dogs in the region? And the answer was, well, we've actually been able to identify three other dogs in central Europe.

And one of them in particular, from a site called Bonnebacastel in Germany, was found, again, a sort of semi-skeleton, there's a mandible, there's a few long bones, but it was found alongside a burial of two individuals, dated around 15,000 years ago. and it has on its mandible some pathologies which have seemingly been able to heal. And the only way they would have been able to heal is through care. And that care we interpret as being almost certainly given by humans. So again, it's this close interaction between humans and humans and dogs, which we see. Goss Cave has essentially unlocked loads of other insights, which we can have about the dog human relationship.

Because before this research, what was the earliest known concrete evidence for dogs in Western Eurasia? Did it actually span as far back as the Paleolithic as the Ice Age? So this is very tricky. As I said earlier, there's been loads of claims. But earliest genetic evidence we have for dogs anywhere before this study was 11,000 years ago. And this was in northern Europe, Sweden, Russia, actually more Western Russia. This dog at Bonneba Castle, although we have very, very poor DNA preservation in it, because of its association with this human burial, because of these pathologies,

it was widely seen as the earliest dog, although genetically we had no understanding of them. We didn't know whether it was a dog or wolf. This analysis has allowed us to confirm, yes, it is indeed a dog. And we found odd ones. Going back to the evidence of post-mortem modification on the mandible, that survives. Selina, I guess that very much aligns with what you mentioned earlier about the human remains. There was that one which has the zigzags on it as well. So there is some clearly on this mandible, dare I use the word art or something like that, some creations on the bone after death that leave

a lasting mark on the remains of this dog. Yeah. So with the human remains on the on the arm bone where we have the zigzag. I think, you know, that you can see as being artistic, you know, that that's, I think both are creative. But, you know, the arm bone one can be seen as being artistic and the, and on the dog bone is definitely modified for a purpose. It's modified, it's creative, it's showing that there is this connection even after death and that it has more purpose to it. So yeah, I think to me, to me anyway, it attests to that that strong bond between human and dog. And it also makes you think, why did they do it? Why did they make this whole in the mandible? Could have Fred have been strung through it and was it being used as something?

I don't know. My brain doesn't allow me to think that way. There's some anthropologists and archaeologists out there who will almost certainly have better insights than I have. But it's, there's no reason to have really have done it. It must have been symbolic. Yeah. I mean, well, Yes, is it not too far-fetched to say necklace? Could this have been a very morbid necklace? I really want it to be a necklace. I really want it to be a necklace. Selina, this is such a cool discovery,

and it sounds like there will be more information coming to light around it in the future. What has this new discovery at Goffs Cave? What would you say it's revealed? What new evidence, what new information has it revealed about people coming back to Britain at the end of the Ice Age, some 15,000. years ago. What new information has it revealed? Yeah, so it's not just revealing information about the dogs, but it's also revealing about people as well. I mean, yes, so it pushes back this earliest genetic evidence for domesticated dog by more than 5,000 years, as we mentioned. But it is

really intriguing this aspect of these different people, these different cultures who had dogs. So Williams mentioned that we have these different groups. We have these Magdaleneans. people, these Magdalenean culture at Goss Cave, and then we have the Epigravettian culture, a different group of people at Pinnabashi Cave in Turkey. We have these different groups. We have these culturally different people, the Magdalenians at Goss Cave, and then we have the Anatolian hunter-gatherers at the Pinnabashi Cave in Turkey. So these two culturally different groups are culturally different. They have different burial practices. They have some different diets. We've said, we have the fish diet evidence at the cave, whereas we have a more faunal diet evidence from

Goss Cave. But they're also genetically distinct. These people actually genetically look different and both and culturally look different. And yet, they both have dogs. And then when we look at the genetics of these dogs, these dogs are actually pretty similar genetically to each other. other. So what this would seem to show is that even though these people aren't exchanging, they're not interbreeding, they're not exchanging cultural goods and ideas, they are exchanging these dogs or these dogs are moving between them or there is the connection between the dogs. It's kind of tantalizing to think that these dogs are the thing that starts to unite people. I mean, again, that's me like kind of imagining things and thinking of this in a kind of a future way.

But, you know, what is true for absolute is that these groups are very culturally different, genetically different, but the dogs are very similar. So something is happening here where they are exchanging the dogs, all these dogs are actually moving between them. There is a closeness there and this could be the thing that is binding them, which is a fascinating thought. It is remarkable that these two sites, three and a half thousand kilometers apart, two and a half thousand miles. Mars have humans. There's no evidence of any interaction between the humans. They're completely different. In an area, even genetically, but they have exactly the same dogs. And we were looking at how to actually, that was a big question for about a month. How on earth did they get there? And our, what we're thinking now is that this sort of third culture, the Epiogovetian,

who we find in a Balkan region, an Italian region, they begin to spread northwards after the Magdaleneans have spread. You see evidence of dogs with this group, this Epigeroetian group, at sites in Italy, Switzerland and Germany. You actually see the Epigervetian coming into the UK at about 14,000 years ago, 14,000, 45,000 years ago. So the Goss Cave is really the example of the last Magdalenean assemblage in the UK. And then after that, the Epigavetian ancestry and lithean culture and their culture spreads across the UK. And it was this expansion, which starts around 16,000 years ago, which we believe perhaps spread these dogs across the region. Because although at Goff's Cave, we don't see any evidence of the Epicretion at Pitta Barsha, in the Anatonia hunter

gaverers, they show evidence of gene flow between the humans. So there is evidence of connectivity epiggetian culture and the Antoine Hunter Gatherer culture. Goss Cave is a little bit more complicated, but the fact that we have Epigavetians 800 years later in the UK makes me think that the dogs were being spread by these Epictetians and that somehow these Magdalanians got these dogs. How they did that? Again, that's one for the

anthropologists, but we almost certainly think that, yeah, that's our current best working hypothesis. It's so interesting, isn't it? I mean, as a Joe Blogs listening in to you guys, does it, do we get a sense then that more than 15,000 years ago that an already

domesticated line of dogs were coming west into Western Eurasia and then, you know, kind of spreading far and wide. So ultimately you get certain domestic dogs in that site in Turkey. But ultimately, you'll say 15,000 years ago, you get a similar type of domestic dog in the UK as well. Is that the information we can start to glean, William? Yeah, that is exactly the sort of information we can start to glean.

And I think what is interesting is the fact that these cultures almost certain, didn't have dogs beforehand. But they've obviously seen a utility of these dogs, and then they've incorporated them into their cultural behaviour. Whereas in sort of later periods, the Mesolithic, the Neolithic, when a dog moves, or when a human moves, a dog moves. Yeah. So it's actually quite easy to track population movements of humans via dog genomes.

They're both sort of quite well correlated. If you see a dog with this ancestry pattern, you're going to see a human with this ancestry pattern. Whereas in the Paleithic, we don't see that. We see the same dogs across completely different human groups. And it's how that radiation happened. We think it's the Evikovietian. We still are pretty uncertain about it, to be honest.

But it appears that dogs have spread due to their utility. Most certainly due to their utility, which is fascinating. Do you think there is likelihood that further Ice Age Canid remains, that may have already been discovered from Goff's Cave or elsewhere, will prove with the new technology, will prove to also be a domestic dog. Do you think we'll have further examples of dogs from Ice Age Britain coming to light in the future?

Yes, I do believe so. Well, I hope so anyway. I agree. That's very exciting. Do you think it will just be from Goffs Cave, or could you see us, are there other very good late Ice Age Britain sites coming to light now? we've got humans, we've got animal remains, that might also reveal more information.

There are. We are working on this, let's just say. We are working on this. And not just the UK as well. We're looking. More to come, Tristan. More to come. You'll be inviting us back again, we hope. Yeah, let's hope. Let's hope. William, what you were saying about dogs coming into Western Eurasia from the east, does this very much align with this idea? I know it must be still murky waters, that when dogs are domesticated from wolves, it doesn't happen in what we now say is Europe. It happens further east, and then you've already got domestic dogs coming west. It's tricky. So I think maybe I misspoke, but I was thinking more of the Epigovetians in the Balkan, Italy region, had these dogs post-Isaid and then spread, rather than being from

the Near East. But in terms of how, where and when dogs themselves became domesticated, we thought when I first had the epiphany that we got a dog here, I really did think we'd be able to answer the question of where were these dogs domesticated? It hasn't really told us anything like that. Our whole paper's gone a completely different way compared to what it could have been, which is origins of dog domestication. And I think the best way to answer this question is just by heavily sampling more canids from the pre-LGM period, which is almost certainly when dogs became domesticated, to try to pinpoint the sort of the link between the grey wolf population,

which became domesticated, and the dog population, which we have domesticated. And there are loads of sort of theories about how this might have occurred. You've got the LGM, so you've got the ice sheets in northern latitudes. Very likely human populations did migrate southwards. gray wolf populations would have migrated southwards into these refugia gray wolf population in very very close interact with the human population that is probably the process of how dogs and wool or how dogs became out of wolves with that interaction between

initially wild wolves and humans and very very strong selected pressures which would have been experienced by this wolf population which then sort of leads them to become dogs but we don't know where it happened definitely eurasia but west east don't know There's loads of like theories and yeah. I'd just add to that, just saying if we think about the fact that we see that dogs and wolves are already so genetically distinct by 15,000 years and they are so widespread across Europe,

as we've said, we've found these dogs now all across Europe. They're widespread. They're very different. So clearly the actual domestication process must have happened quite a while before them. That's just what I would add to that. Yeah, exactly. And you can sort of predict the divergence of a population of genetic data from modern genetic data and come very strongly predict it was between 40 and 20,000 years ago, which isn't that precise, to be honest.

Many studies have come out saying, okay, it must have been 100,000 years ago, 80,000 years ago. But now with the latest data, it's between 40 and 20, it's still isn't particularly precise. But in terms of the archaeology and the sort of climate of the time, that is when the climate was beginning to worsen glacial maximum type. thing. So then you're beginning to see populations behaving in perhaps different manners they were 50,000. It's actually a very informative time point really. It probably is a time point where not only was probably the most important, the dog domestication, but also human cultural evolution is probably the most important time period for that pre-Neolithic. Selina, William, this is a really exciting time and it sounds like there's more exciting

information that will be coming to light around Britain's oldest dog, around dogs in Ice Age, Britain and Europe in the future. Good luck with all the research. Hope to get you back on the show when that information comes to light. And it just goes for me to say, thank you so much to you both for coming on the show. Tristan, always a pleasure to be here. Thank you so much for having us. Yes, an absolute pleasure and we will be seeing you again, no doubt. Well, there you go. There was Dr. William Marsh and Dr. Selina Brace talking through this brand new research. This exciting new discovery that Britain's first known dog goes back to the Ice Age, some 15,000 years old.

Really exciting time for those studying Ice Age remains and early human remains with the new developments in science. That means that more and more discoveries are going to be revealed in the years ahead. We know how much you love it when we explore the deep past, the Ice Age, Human Evolution and so on. So don't you worry, we'll be doing more episodes similar to this in the future. I hope you enjoyed it. Thank you so much for listening. Now, if you enjoyed The Ancients, please make sure to follow the show on Spotify or wherever you get to your podcasts. That really helps us, and you'll be doing us a big favour.

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