SUBSISTENCE × GENETICS

The Wolf Comes to the Fire

~23,000 years ago (debated)

Palaeolithic · Upper Palaeolithic · Last glacial · Last Glacial Maximum

The first domestic animal was not livestock but a companion: the dog, drawn from grey wolves somewhere in eastern Eurasia, plausibly in Siberia around 23,000 years ago, when people and wolves alike were penned in by the cold of the glacial maximum. Ancient genomes show dogs already travelling with the first people into the Americas, and dogs in the Near East and Africa drawing up to half their ancestry from a second, southwestern wolf population.

Why it matters

Before any field was sown, our species had already reshaped another animal's evolution, or been adopted by it: which partner domesticated which remains a fair question. Dogs guarded camps, hauled, hunted and warmed sleepers through the coldest millennia of the ice age, and they walked into the Americas at our side. The partnership predates pottery and permanent settlement, and it has never lapsed since.

Dating & uncertaintyDisputed

No consensus date exists. Comparing dog and human population histories puts domestication in Siberia by about 23,000 years ago, during the glacial maximum; ancient wolf genomes place dogs closest to eastern Eurasian wolves, with a second, southwestern contribution read either as a separate domestication or as later mixing. Claimed Palaeolithic dogs up to 40,000 years old stretch the window at the old end, while the deep split between East Asian and Western Eurasian dogs is dated only to between 14,000 and 6,400 years ago, at or after the first appearance of dogs in either region.

Sources

1. Perri et al. (2021), PNAS · Dog domestication and the dual dispersal of people and dogs into the Americasdoi:10.1073/pnas.2010083118
2. Bergström et al. (2022), Nature · Grey wolf genomic history reveals a dual ancestry of dogsdoi:10.1038/s41586-022-04824-9
3. Frantz et al. (2016), Science · Genomic and archaeological evidence suggest a dual origin of domestic dogsdoi:10.1126/science.aaf3161

Our species’ history as one day

22:14:511 h 45 min before midnight

if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day