The Ancients - The First Dogs

Episode Date: February 1, 2024

For millennia dogs have been undoubtedly man’s best friend. But when did humans first start keeping dogs as pets? The fascinating story of how ancient hunter gatherers first domesticated our now beloved canines is the subject of today’s episode and takes us right back into the depths of the Ice Age.Tristan is joined in this episode by archeologist Dr Angela Perri to chat about how the wild wolf packs that roamed the icy wastes of the ancient world gradually became the four pawed friends we know and love today.This episode was edited by Aidan Lonergan and produced by Annie Coloe and Joseph KnightDiscover the past with exclusive history documentaries and ad-free podcasts presented by world-renowned historians from History Hit. Watch them on your smart TV or on the go with your mobile device. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code ANCIENTS sign up now for your 14-day free trial HERE.You can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's the ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and in today's episode, where we are talking about the origins of man's best friend, the origins of dogs. The domestication of the dog is a fascinating story that takes us back to the Ice Age tens of thousands of years ago. It's a tale that will take us across the length of the Eurasian continent and even into the

Americas too, so get ready. Joining me to explain all, I was delighted to interview the brilliant archaeologist Dr. Angela Perry, who has researched the story of early prehistoric dogs at sites all across the world, from North America to Kazakhstan to Siberia. I really do hope you enjoy, and here's Angela. Angela, it is wonderful to have you on the podcast today. Yeah for having me I'm excited to be here you're more than welcome and for this topic early dogs man's best friend this is the earliest animal domesticated by humans yes I mean that we know of yeah I mean pretty far back in terms of ahead of the other domesticated animals that we know of so maybe like over 10,000

years before any other animal domesticated so yeah. So how far back in the archaeological record can we go when looking at evidence for well some of the earliest domestication for dogs? So it's tricky right we have I'm an archaeologist so archaeologist, so I want to say, I want to see hands on bones. I want to see the skeletal remains of some dogs, but I also work in ancient DNA. So I have to make an argument for, you know, the genetic evidence for domestication of dogs. So our most recent paper on this topic was kind of focused on, you know, the genetic evidence for seeing, you know, what we call like maybe a ghost dog. We can see the genetic evidence of dogs dating to around 23,000 years ago, but we don't have any actual physical remains that are anywhere near this timeline. So we can see essentially that we have two populations of dogs that kind

of split off from each other around 23,000 years ago, meaning that they must have had a common ancestor that was also itself a dog. So we can date that population split to 23,000 years ago. So we assume we had dogs at least 23,000 years ago. And you kind of mentioned it there, Angela. So when approaching this topic, I mean, what types of material do you have available to try and learn more? It seems like the science has really come on in the last few years. Yeah, I mean, lucky for me, dogs is a sexy hot topic, right? The recent kind of group of us who are dog researchers has really exploded in the last kind of five to 10 years. In the same time, ancient DNA analysis has really kind of come along. So these two things have kind

of combined together. So obviously the kind of skeletal, to use your word, skeletal remains of dogs is our primary focus when we're looking at kind of dog domestication, but also the DNA. But also we have lots of sites that have other really interesting kind of telltale signs of dogs so we have this kind of material culture evidence of dogs we have things like finding bones and things that have been chewed kind of gnawed at archaeological sites we have things like sledding dogs sledding material that suggests maybe of dogs at a site. We have kind of artistic depictions and renderings. So in Saudi Arabia, for example, we have really old dog rock art way before we have any kind of physical evidence of dogs there.

So, you know, we kind of have these like little hints and clues about dogs. Let's take the world picture and go to different parts in the world to kind of explore this story of when we start seeing dogs emerge. Now, you also kind of mentioned this near the beginning, Angela, but when going back, let's say more than 20,000 years ago, what's the belief at the moment in regards to the origins for dog domestication? do they think that this originates from one particular area or that it emerged in different areas independently at similar times so it's funny about dogs because there has been such a focus on dogs for the last five or ten years and we really haven't gotten very far in what we understand about dog domestication every time we think we're

getting close to an answer we just find more more questions, which I think is good science. I think that that makes it more interesting, more exciting, more people get on board and start writing papers that kind of contradict each other and more evidence. So where we're at right now with domestication is it's tricky because dogs, like many other domesticated animals, continued to procreate with wolves. You know, as dogs were domesticated, more they had kind of interactions with wolves continuously. And for the genetics, at least, and the skeletal morphology kind of causes issues in us trying to determine, you know, when was domestication exactly? How do we identify what was a dog or a wolf? So in terms of location, we're still up for debate on where that is. We wrote

a paper recently that suggested that dogs were likely domesticated in Siberia, northern Siberia, in that 23,000 year ago timeline. But then very quickly, like humans, essentially humans were kind of trapped up in Siberia during the last ice age, kind of hanging out, waiting for things to sort themselves out climatically before they pushed back into the rest of Eurasia. And we think like humans,

that dogs were domesticated kind of in Siberia and then pushed back out into the rest of Eurasia. And that might be why genetically all dogs look very similarly related and kind of appear across Eurasia at similar time periods. So that's our attempt at explaining it, right? They're domesticated in Siberia during this time where humans and animals are kind of trapped and hanging out. And then they explode back into Eurasia kind of along with humans at this time. So, but you'll talk to another group of people who will disagree with that and say, that's not right at all. Dogs were domesticated in multiple locations, you know, all over Eurasia.

It's tricky because the genetics aren't clear. The archaeological record isn't clear. Other evidence for dogs isn't quite clear either. But that's our explanation of the timing and the kind of location. It's just really interesting. And as you say, as more information comes to light in the years ahead too, but how when looking at this topic, if we're looking at Paleolithic dogs in Western Eurasia, and then as you mentioned also in Eastern Eurasia, places like Siberia, could it potentially therefore be that in certain parts of the world, maybe at a later date, that an alternative view is that early dogs in one part of the world were domesticated from a different kind of wolf to an early

domesticated dog in a different part of the world? Yeah. So one of the things we can tell from the genetics is that every dog that we know of appears to be descended from the same lineage of wolves. Now, what we know about that source population is that we've yet to find it. So we suspect it's an extinct population of ancient gray wolves. We know it's a gray wolf. We know it's not our modern gray wolves. It's a gray wolf closely related, but we've yet to find it. So we suspect some population of gray wolves, I would say in Siberia, that are now extinct. And we've yet to kind of come across their genetic material to identify. Yep, that's it. But we can see that dogs are all domesticated from this same population. So

going back to the story I just told, we think it's likely that a scenario such as humans domesticate a small Siberian gray wolf population, those dogs move with humans back down out of Siberia into Germany, China, the Caucasus, those areas. But as they're moving down, those dogs are interbreeding with local wolf populations. And that's what gets us that suggestion that we have dogs domesticated in multiple locations because dogs love interbreeding with wolves. And so you end up with early dog material that appears to be kind of geographically isolated. But I suspect it's just that those dog populations are interbreeding with the local wolf populations in multiple locations. Going back to the question of when wolves are being domesticated, they become dogs

for the first time, let's say in Siberia, as per the argument of yourself and your team, I guess a big question has to be, why? What was the incentive? yourself and your team, I guess a big question has to be why, what was the incentive? Yeah. So sometimes when I'm, you know, laying in bed at night or, you know, everyone has great ideas in the shower and sometimes I'm just in the shower thinking about dogs and domestication. Eureka, eureka, yeah. Yeah. And that's always my question is, you know, humans and wolves lived alongside each other for tens of thousands of years before they were domesticated. Why suddenly, you know, 20,000 years ago, do people think this is the time we're doing it now?

What would have happened? So I'm always trying to think of what's the driver, right? What happened that made people decide now we're doing this? And for me, the kind of isolation in Siberia, that isolation of humans, but also the kind of isolation in Siberia, that isolation of humans, but also the kind of isolation of wolf populations likely made those two groups of carnivores that are very similar in many ways. We're daylight hunters. We hunt things larger than ourselves. We're pack animals who care for each other's young. We are very similar to wolves in lots of ways. animals who care for each other's young. We're very similar to wolves in lots of ways. And it's likely that in kind of an isolated area such as Beringia, which is what we call that kind of area in northeast Siberia during the Ice Age, that wolves would have been kind of thinking about alternate resources, one of which would be humans make a lot of trash. We leave a lot of rubbish

around. We kill an animal and don't eat it all. We leave its bones and skin and lot of trash. We leave a lot of rubbish around. We kill an animal and don't eat it all. We leave its bones and skin and all of that. And we suspect that, you know, wolves would have figured out very quickly that humans are a great source for food. And if you just follow the humans around enough, you know, they'll leave enough trash behind them that you could kind of, you and your young kind of live off of them. And what happens with all wild animals, and we know this now from modern populations of things like bears and foxes, you know, we have urban foxes here in the UK that essentially live off of humans, right, and live in an urban environment. And wolves would be no different in that you would have

populations of wolves who became dependent on humans and their offspring would eventually only know how to depend on humans and wouldn't know any world in which a wolf is a wild hunter they would know themselves as wolf the scavenger and that the way we survive is by scavenging off of humans and those populations would eventually breed additional populations and additional populations and additional populations. And you get so far into the generations of wolves that had never hunted, they'd never been wild hunters, and had only been scavengers, right? And so we see this now with things like bears in Alaska that are largely feeding off of,

you know, trash pits or people's waste. And, you know, you see a lot of wild animals around the world that have become highly dependent on humans' trash. And there's no reason that wolves would be any different and that generationally you would get 10 generations down the line where you'd have a wolf pup that has no concept that they're the hunter of great things. They just know themselves as the trash pit wolf. As you've highlighted there, something I hadn't even thought about, Angela, is the fact that it's almost a natural process over time because of the waste, because of the food remains left by these groups. And also you highlighted these highly mobile groups as well. So this was just something that could potentially have just come

about after generations of sticking very close to these groups of humans. Yeah, exactly. And I think, you know, we see good examples of it now, and it's not completely difficult to understand. And I think some of the other proposals of how wolves may have been domesticated, such as, you know, humans see a totally adorable wolf pup and think, that's coming home with me. A combination of these things, you know, they're not mutually exclusive. Our idea of the trash pile scavenger

hypothesis, which is kind of what we call that, does not exclude the idea that also people thought wolf pups were really cute and they were going to bring them in. And it almost has to be a combination of those two in a way that you start to see wolf pups and wolves kind of living on the edge of your village at first. And we know this very well from the way that people interact with modern wild animals, that you see them out there. You know, people live among bears and wolves and coyotes and all sorts of things. You see them out there. And as long as they kind of don't bother you and you don't bother them,

they live on the fringes. We're kind of okay with that. The occasional one gets a little feisty. We kill it, leaving the kind of okay with that. The occasional one gets a little feisty. We kill it, leaving the kind of passive ones to continue to breed. And then eventually you get a population of semi-passive, self-domesticated in many ways, wolves that are on the fringe. You allow to get closer and closer. Maybe they start walking through your village, getting closer to you and your kids. You're kind of okay with it because they don't bother you too much. And eventually

come up with a situation where you kind of have some domesticated animals. Maybe you don't mind it so much because they keep other predators away from your camp. They keep the camp kind of clean on the outside. They clean up your rubbish and your poo and all the things that you don't want sitting around your village. And so you think maybe it's not the worst thing to have them around. No such thing as a silly question. Why have these particular groups become isolated? So what we call the LGM, the kind of last glacial maximum, the ice age, the last kind of big ice age, was a kind of climatically fraught period where we went to glacial conditions pretty quickly and populations essentially withdrew from northern Eurasia into kind of central and southern Eurasia but some populations withdrew north and so

they withdrew into this area that we call a refugium in northeastern Siberia, kind of on the very northeastern area of Siberia, where it appears that there was a kind of a climatic refuge where it wasn't so bad up in that corner. And instead of making your way all the way down south back through Siberia, you kind of sheltered in place in this area. So we have lots of interesting evidence from this area of populations of animals that kind of survived in very small groups. And it's not a small area. It's Siberia. It's still fairly large, but you wouldn't have wanted to pass back through the rest of Siberia into Eurasia. You would have been kind of isolated in this northeast corner. And seemingly, they had enough resources, food, and eventually, these are the people who made their way across the Bering land bridge into the Americas,

and then others who continued back down into Eurasia. Let's go west before we go east. I'd like to talk a bit about that Arctic element to it, which is really, really interesting. You've got names like the Husky in my notes, I'd like to talk a bit about that Arctic element to it, which is really, really interesting. You've got names like the husky in my notes. I'd love to ask that. Yeah, yeah. Before we go east across the Bering land bridge, if we go west towards, let's say, Western Eurasia, by the time we get those communities coming back there, and you mentioned earlier how then these dogs are then interbreeding with other species of wolf over there. other species of wolf over there. Do we know much about the wolf in these Western Eurasian hunter-gatherer societies, living in the last stages of the Ice Age? We know that people interacted with wolves quite a bit. We know that people killed wolves and skinned

them and used their fur and all those kinds of things. And we have plenty of evidence of the remains of wolves at sites in Western Eurasia. And we know that we have plenty of evidence of the remains of wolves at sites in kind of Western Eurasia. And we know that we have a population of dogs that still exists. We kind of subdivide worldwide dogs into largely A, B, C and D groups. And we know that the C group is the kind of European dog group and that you know populations of dogs were occasionally replaced so we know that we from the earliest dogs we have in Europe these kind of c-group dogs that they hung out in Europe for quite a long time but eventually movement in from a population called the Yamnaya that came kind of from the Asian side moving into Europe that they brought their type A dogs with them.

And that eventually these type A dogs kind of swamped out most of the European type dogs. So we still have lots of kind of C group dogs in existence. But there are these A type dogs, which is what things like New Guinea singing dogs, dingoes, huskies, all those types of dogs fall into. So most of the world's population of dogs now is type A group dogs. So like humans, you know, populations ebb and flow and move and push out other populations and other groups move in and there's interbreeding and things like that. and how important a part of these hunter-gatherer societies do these early dogs become when we're talking about these massive distances that these communities are ultimately covering. Yeah, so my PhD was actually talking a lot about dogs as hunting tools and technology. I'm really

interested in the idea of working dogs and what dogs do for us and help us do. And so, you know, if you ask my PhD, dogs were incredibly important for early hunter-gatherers across the world. When we're coming out of that ice age, right, we again have a pretty extreme climatic shift out of that ice age. We have rapid warming and we enter the time period called the Holocene, which we're in now, which is much warmer, obviously, than the ice age we were in previously. And we're thankful for that. And one of the things that happened along with that is that, you know, the environment changed. And one of the things that happened along with that is that, you know, the environment changed. We were previously in kind of polar tundras or kind of cold conifer forests.

We moved into deciduous forests and warmer land. And with that, the prey species changed, right? We know that at the end of the Ice Age, a lot of megafauna went extinct. A lot of the things that hunter-gatherers before dog domestication were hunting went extinct. A lot of the things that hunter-gatherers before dog domestication were hunting went extinct, and we moved into kind of smaller animal populations like deer and boar, and that kind of became the focus for Eurasian hunters were those kind of mid-size animals. And anyone who hunts knows that using a dog to hunt deer and boar is kind of like prime use of a dog. Hunting in dense forests is really hard. I've done a lot of it and I've done a lot of it with dogs. And I can tell you that hunting a dense forest for a deer or a boar with a dog

is a lot easier than hunting a dense forest by yourself. I can tell you what it feels like to be in a dense forest. Hunting boar is terrifying. And having a dog with you makes life a whole lot easier. And we know that early hunter- hunter gatherers across Eurasia and in North America figured this out pretty quickly that a dog was a kind of prime use for hunting and they use them pretty extensively. And does that kind of correlate with the surviving evidence of other dog skeletons or genetics that is it at that time that you do really see a mass explosion of the amount of dogs in these communities you do around 10 11 000 years ago

is when you just really see dogs coming in across the world and you start to see things in that kind of deciduous forest belt that a large portion of the kind of hunter gatherers are living you start to see dog burials all over the place and in places where you would think that people would be hunting deer and boar. You see dog burials that are very elaborate. They're very human-like. You see dogs being buried with things like projectile points and arrow tips and deer antler and kind of all the like regalia that you typically think of, like a human male hunter being buried with you see almost the exact equivalent in these dog burials they're buried very lovingly you know I've excavated a number of these burials where you can tell that the dog has

been placed in a burial pit with their tail and their feet kind of curled around them and they're just like in a almost like sleeping like position and it's so sweet and they've got their little grave goods with them and you can tell that someone really cared about this animal and it meant a lot to the local community. If we do go back into the Ice Age at the time where there was still megafauna about, if talking about Western Eurasia my mind immediately thinks of the iconic cave art that you see where they have all these depictions of massive Ice Age megafauna that they were hunting and then deer and aurochs and so on and so forth. Do you see any depictions of dogs amongst them anywhere? In some of the very later rock art, the Magdalenian rock art, which kind of dates to that time period where we know we definitely have

dogs, we see a few dogs. But the early stuff, Chauvet Cave and Altamira and those places in France and Spain that are dating to, you know, the 30,000 year old mark, we don't see any depictions of dogs. We have a couple examples that people think are wolves, but no depictions of dogs, which makes sense because I don't think dogs were domesticated during that timeframe. So it makes sense. And also, you know, a lot of evidence shows that dogs are not actually useful for the hunting of megafauna, that they actually spook large animals and it gives the animals time to run before you can hunt them. And, you know, most megafauna like that probably would have been hunted by ambush. And dogs aren't really great at

ambush hunting. They're loud. The prey species can smell them from a mile away. They're really good at chase hunting. It would make sense that you wouldn't really find dogs very useful for hunting large megafauna that you're trying to ambush. Before we get to the Americas and crossing into America for these hunter-gatherer communities, I remember when we last chatted quite a few months ago now, we actually talked for a bit of time about Kazakhstan and our visits. We've both been to Kazakhstan quite recently and you've done some work out there. I remember doing an interview not too long ago with

Dr. Carolyn Willicks on the origins of horse riding and horse domestication. But when looking at the botai culture a bit later, admittedly, something that I hadn't realized until Carolyn mentioned it was that horses originally had been domesticated not for riding not as companions but for food now is there any evidence potentially that dogs in the early stage of domestication were used as sources of food so we don't have evidence like horses that their primary use would have been food we definitely have evidence that in emergency situations, like dogs, you know, I like to call dogs like a Swiss army knife because they just do everything. And one of their uses is an emergency food and fur source. We know that from, you know, explorers in the 18th and 1900s that they would use their dogs as emergency food sources.

And we see some evidence of that early on, but it's definitely not the primary use. When we do see dogs being used as food a lot is when agriculture comes in and the importance of a hunting dog decreases, then suddenly people are like, wow, we've got all these dogs. We don't really need them anymore because we've got grain now. And then people really start butchering dogs and consuming dogs kind of in many places across the world so definitely the importance of dogs seems tied to things like sledding and hunting and that they become less important when agriculture comes in but then people find different uses for them you know that's kind of the rise of livestock guarding dogs and guard dogs

and things like that well you mentioned sledding right there. And of course, we were talking recently about Eastern Siberia. So let's keep going east. Is therefore the domestication of the dog, is it really significant in allowing early groups of people to live and survive in Arctic conditions? I think so. I think I used to be a real proponent of hunting as the first use of dog, but I've really come around doing lots of work in the Arctic that it must have been that sledding was the first use of a dog. And we have some really interesting evidence from Siberia showing, for example, that people were sourcing raw stone tool materials from very, very far distances, which, you know, across the Arctic plateau thinking they're not there. That's a far distance to be walking for raw material. And if you had sled dogs, which we have evidence of sledding at that site and toggles and things like that, that you would normally put

on a sled dog, it would, you'd be going a lot faster if you're using sled dogs to move across these areas. And I think movement of people across Siberia during that time period, movement of people, you know, back into Eurasia and eventually across into the Americas would have been, you know, significantly increased by the use of a sled dog. And, you know, anyone who lives in Arctic and rural communities now knows the use of a sled dog. I mean, a lot of them use machine sleds now, but up until very recently, the use of sledding dogs to move you across vast ground in the Arctic was a really normal thing. Is there evidence of sledges,

therefore, dating back to the Ice Age in northeastern Siberia? That's mad. We do. We have some really early evidence dating to around 10,000 years ago, obvious evidence of sledge dog use. And I suspect that, you know, the problem with Siberia is it's such a vast area and finding archaeological sites in Siberia is like a needle in a haystack. And so I suspect that there's a lot of evidence out there for sledge dogs much earlier, but we haven't found the site quite yet. Also, again, there weren't a ton of people living there. It was a smaller population of people who were kind of isolating there. So finding the evidence, finding the archaeological sites, and then getting lucky

enough to find the dogs that we can evaluate is a work in progress. We're still looking for that wolf population that dogs were domesticated from. So, yeah. Well, let's keep going east therefore, across the Bering Strait. Angela, big question. I know sometimes controversial question as well, but what do we know about when and how humans reach North America? And should we therefore be picturing these groups with dogs? Really controversial question here. So I think everyone, you know, except a kind of fringe group of people are mostly on board with the idea that the Americas were populated across the Bering Strait, the Bering Land

Bridge, and people moving in to the Americas in that way. Bering Strait, the Bering Land Bridge, and people moving into the Americas in that way. Until pretty recently, there was the question of, did people go completely by land or was there kind of a coastal migration as well? I think we've come to the realization that it's probably both, that people are moving inland through this kind of what we call ice-free corridor, moving across land, but also probably moving down the coast that way as well. We have some early but also probably moving down the coast. That way as well, we have some early sites and early evidence on the coast. We have some very recent evidence of early dogs on those coastal sites as well that are very, very closely related to, you know,

husky, malamute, arctic dog populations as well. They all fall within the very small subset of a kind of a haplogroup, a DNA group, showing that they're very closely related. So, you know, we think that humans and their dogs moved into the Americas probably sometime around 15 to 20,000 years ago. I won't put an exact number on that because the debate is still raging, but I would say that most people who work in the peopling of the Americas space would probably agree that that 15 to 20,000 year mark is probably a safe bet. And amongst the material from this time that I know people like David Meltz have done a lot of work around, as you highlighted there, Angela. So there is the evidence now of these early dogs coming across with the humans. Yes. I think if we have evidence that dogs were domesticated by 23,000 years ago in Siberia, and that these are the populations that are the ancestors of Native American peoples, then it's our suggestion, the paper that I wrote with Dave was that dogs were

likely domesticated in Siberia by the ancestors of Native Americans and then made their way back into the Americas with ancestral Native Americans and then kind of split out into various groups across the Americas. But also that same population of dogs moved back into the rest of Eurasia as well. And that's why all dogs worldwide are clearly from the same source population and seemingly are closely related, but are different in lots of ways as well with the addition of local wolf genetics being popped in here, there, and everywhere. So yeah, I think that they definitely came across with humans, and then they spread out across the Americas with humans as well. Let's explore one of these sites in focus in North America that I know you've done

some work around, and this is the site of Costa. Now, Angela, what is this site? So Costa is a site in central Illinois that's really interesting because it is the spread of time that it covers is really extensive. So Koster expands from around 11, 12,000 years ago all the way into kind of a historic period. So we've got a nice understanding of how people lived in this one site for many thousands of years. And for a long time, up until very recently, Koster was the site of the earliest dogs in the Americas. We have at least five dog burials from Koster and then individual kind of dog remains from other parts of the site. We know that dogs at Koster were, these five burials were intentional burials, again, buried

in the way of, you know, kind of curling the tails around and had grave goods with them and were clearly, you know, treated with some kind of reverence. Also, we know that the dogs at Koster were probably fairly small. I think most people would assume that the earliest dogs would be these, you know, huge kind of husky like dogs. these huge kind of husky-like dogs. But by the time we have dogs at Koster dated to around 10,000 years ago, we think dogs would have been domesticated for at least 13,000 years. So it's in some way no surprise that they're not these huge husky-type dogs. What's interesting in the dogs at Koster is that we had two different kind of types of dogs. We could tell from their skeletal remains that they didn't look the same, all the dogs. Some dogs seemed like bigger and more robust. And some of the

dogs seemed more kind of like gracile, thin boned. And we were trying to figure out what was happening here. And so we did some kind of genetic testing on them. And we realized that a few of the dogs from Koster had very, very recent coyote ancestry. So they were actually what we call coy dogs. So they're kind of half and half coyote dogs. Again, I'll just reiterate, canids love interbreeding with each other. They will breed with anything. You got wolves, you got coyotes, you got dogs, they are happy to kind of interbreed. And so clearly the local dog population at Koster was also like hanging out with coyotes. And these people had these kind of interbreed and so clearly the local dog population at costar was also like hanging out with coyotes and these people had these kind of coy dog mixes that is insane because

my next question is gonna be like how did these dogs coming to north america how they affected the american ecosystem and one of those key ways as you say is that they interbred with other canids already present on that continent yeah but then there would have been both coyotes and wolves in the Americas. And so they definitely interbred with coyotes and wolves. And, you know, part of going back to Kazakhstan, part of the issue of dogs and wolves and kind of wild canids that can interbreed, you know, when I was there, I interacted with many people who were kind of pastoralists who said we choose to leave our dogs out at night in the hopes that they will interbreed with a wolf to make them a bigger,

stronger, tougher dog to fight off wolves. And so we know that this happens now, that this always happened, that intentionally or not, humans are interbreeding their dogs with other animals. Do domesticated dogs affect the American ecosystem in any other ways? Yeah, I think obviously the arrival of dogs and shortly before them wolves and coyotes as well would have significantly changed the ecosystem in terms of hunting for other prey species. So for example, one of the other kind of things I work on is dire wolves and looking at what happened with dire wolves and why did dire wolves go extinct. And I

think, you know, dire wolves and saber-toothed cats and all those kind of iconic animals. Dire wolves. So they are not just something from Game of Thrones. This is an actual creature. Wow. They're a real, real thing. thing extinct now, but very real. And only in the Americas. We know from a recent paper that we did on genetic analyses and radiocarbon dating that humans in the Americas and their dogs would have seen dire wolves. They would have interacted with dire wolves. They would have overlapped for, you know, a couple thousand year time period.

have overlapped for, you know, a couple thousand year time period. And the arrival of humans and their dogs may have contributed to the kind of downfall of dire wolves, because what a dog allows you to do in hunting flexibility, you know, your ability to take out large groups of prey species very quickly, probably would have affected the prey availability for animals like saber-toothed cats and direwolves. We also think that there's a possibility that dogs arrive with who knows what kind of disease and that this disease is passed on to coyotes and wolves and who knows who else. They probably would have contributed to the downfall of some small prey species populations as well. Because, you know, we suspect that dogs were kind of left to their own devices around villages. So they probably would have been out kind of scavenging for themselves with small animals and small prey.

So yeah, I mean, I think dogs and humans are an invasive species in the Americas, and they would have arrived and kind of done some real disruption to the local ecosystem who had never seen a dog or a human before. It's really interesting because there are similarities across all of the world like I remember like with the Polynesians for instance when they reach some of these isolated Pacific islands one of the main animals they bring with them is the dog and the rat as you say and it really alters the ecosystems of those islands just before we completely wrap up so you mentioned there about like disease so when you look at like the remains of these very early dogs are you able to kind of get a sense of an average life expectancy or were

there any diseases that seems to be quite common with these early dogs? So we have quite a bit of evidence of distemper, which we still vaccinate our dogs against now, right? Distemper across dogs. And you can see distemper in the teeth. It leaves a little pitting in the teeth. So we have quite a bit of evidence of distemper across early dogs. It must have been quite common. We also do have evidence of lots of injuries to dogs, probably related to things like hunting or sledding, where dogs have like broken bones or a prey species has, you know, kicked a dog and the bone has healed again, which, you know, must have been with the assistance of a human kind of helping it out and making sure that it can continue to walk. And we have lots of evidence that dogs, seemingly some dogs live to a pretty old age of what we would think of as an ancient hunter gatherer dog living till, you know, 10 years old is pretty old for any dog and much less a dog who's, you know, really living a tough life as a hunter gatherer dog. So we have some evidence of dogs that seemingly have injuries that older

dogs with a severe injury that has healed that gives you the impression that you know this dog is probably not incredibly useful as a hunting dog but someone must have loved it and taken care of it and you know put it in this burial and it has an injury that has clearly healed and that someone's fed it and loved it and you know cared for it so isn't that thing like that kind of altruistic nature something that is so relatable to us today with dogs because you've mentioned like you know being used for hunting and so on but the care that these people took in the burials of their dogs and also examples as you say if the dogs having their wounds healed is this just brilliant evidence to show how far back this idea of the dog as your loving

companion stretches in the story of humans down back into prehistory? Yeah, I think that if you talk to any people, including modern groups who rely on their dogs, who really depend on their dogs to do something, a working dog to do something for you, that the concept of what a dog means is very different from what we think of as a dog, you know, who lays on our couch and we pick up its poo and we feed it. Relying on your dog as a member of the pack, as someone who does something for you, kind of elevates them in some way as, you know, you see them as almost human-like and you treat them in the way that you would treat your humans when you die. We do this even when our dogs don't do anything for us, right? We bury our dogs and

have elaborate ceremonies and dress them up and do all sorts of things with our dogs. Somehow dogs have like wiggled their way like into our domestic space in a way that no other animal has. And they kind of, I'm not sure what it is. It must just be that this relationship between humans and dogs is so ancient that we just have some innate capacity to just care for a dog and include a dog in our lives. And I know all the cat lovers out there are just thinking, my cat does that too, but a cat does not love you the way your dog loves you, right? but a cat does not love you the way your dog loves you right um and so there's just something between um humans and dogs that feels like a kind of ancient connection between us so we've gotten to the point where they don't even have to do anything for us to um kind of receive this kind

of revered quality right absolutely angela this has been absolutely brilliant. It sounds like, as you say, this is always a sexy hot topic and that when more information comes to light, more scientific developments, I mean, there is still so much to learn, still so much to be discovered about some of these earliest dogs and the story of dog domestication. Yes. I mean, it's ongoing forever. I mean, like I said, every time we think we have something solved, we come up with 10 new questions, which are all exciting. Lucky for us that we're in a field that is not so easy to solve and that everyone's interested in and that, you know, everywhere I go, I get amazing dog stories from people and people tell me what their dog does and their dog's personalities and what breed their dog is.

And, you know, that they've done genetic testing on their dog and all this kind of exciting stuff. And so it's never ending. So we have a job for life. From Siberia to Kazakhstan to the United States to Sunderland. Angela, it just goes for me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today. I appreciate it. Thanks so much. Well, there you go there was dr angela perry talking all things early dogs and why they were so important to these bands of humans crossing the eurasian continent and even into the americas too i hope you enjoyed today's episode last thing for me wherever you're listening to

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