HUMAN EVOLUTION × EVOLUTION

The Domestication of the Dog

~23,000 years ago (estimates 40,000 to 14,000)

Phanerozoic · Cenozoic · Quaternary · Pleistocene · Late Pleistocene

The dog is the domesticated descendant of wolves that tolerated people, a change that took place about 23,000 years ago by one estimate, thousands of years before any crop was sown, and most probably in eastern Eurasia.

Dog domestication is the change by which wolves that tolerated human proximity became dogs. It took place thousands of years before any crop was sown or any other animal kept. Bergström and colleagues (2022) compared the genome, or complete DNA, of dogs with that of seventy-two ancient wolves, which lived over the last hundred thousand years. The comparison makes eastern Eurasia the more probable place of origin. It also shows that dogs in the Near East and Africa draw as much as half their ancestry from a second, western source. That result implies either two domestications or an early admixture, the interbreeding of dogs with local wolves. Dogs subsequently travelled with people into the Americas.

Why it matters

The dog was the first domesticated species, and it served as a hunting partner rather than as a food resource. Its domestication occurred while every human population still lived on wild plants and animals. The grey wolf, the species from which dogs come, survived the last ice age, unlike many other large mammals. Researchers can therefore compare the wild animal and the domestic animal directly, which makes the dog one of the animals whose domestication is best documented.

Dating & uncertaintyDisputed

Dog genomes, compared with those of 72 ancient wolves, indicate a domestication in eastern Eurasia. Dogs of the Near East and Africa also have a second ancestry, which corresponds either to a distinct domestication or to later admixture with local wolves. The date remains uncertain. Ages estimated from bones and ages estimated from genomes have not converged, and the estimates range from 40,000 to 14,000 years ago.

Earth history as one day

23:59:59.56438 ms before midnight

if Earth’s 4.54 billion years were compressed into a single day