Siberian dog skull shows signs of early domestication
Past Horizons, 04-08-2011
A remarkable 33,000 year old dog from a cave in the Siberian Altai mountains shows evidence of dog domestication, the earliest ever found. The extraordinary preservation of the dog from the Razboinichya Cave, including skull, mandibles and teeth, allowed a Russian-led international team of archaeologists to conduct a complete morphological examination. They were able to compare this specimen with examples of wild wolves prior to the Last Glacial Maximum (ca. 26,500–19,000 cal BP), modern wolves, prehistoric domesticated dogs, and early dog-like canids, using morphological criteria to distinguish between wolves and dogs. It was found that the Razboinichya Cave individual is most similar to fully domesticated dogs from Greenland (about 1000 years old), and unlike ancient and modern wolves, and putative dogs from Eliseevichi I site in central Russia.
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