SUBSISTENCE × GENETICS

The Domestication of the Dog

~23,000 years ago (debated)

Palaeolithic · Upper Palaeolithic · Last glacial · Last Glacial Maximum

The dog, the first domesticated animal, diverged from the grey wolf in Siberia around 23,000 years ago, a date still debated.

The domestication of the dog designates the differentiation of Canis familiaris from the grey wolf, Canis lupus, somewhere in eastern Eurasia, probably in Siberia, around 23,000 years ago. The dog is the first domesticated animal, preceding any livestock species. The date proceeds from an argument of minimum rather than from a dated find: by the end of the glacial period the dog family tree was already divided into distinct lineages, and those branches cannot predate the domestication from which they derive, which pushes the separation from the wolf further back. The Siberian location follows from the glacial context, which confined humans and wolves to the same ice-free refuges for millennia, the condition of the prolonged contact domestication requires. Ancient genomes show dogs accompanying the first populations entering the Americas, and dogs of the Near East and Africa drawing up to half their ancestry from a second, south-western wolf population.

Why it matters

The human species altered the evolution of another species before any cultivation, the direction of the initiative remaining debated. The documented or probable functions of the dog, guarding, traction, hunting and the provision of warmth, are exercised during the coldest millennia of the period, and the association predates ceramics and sedentism.

Dating & uncertaintyDisputed

No date commands consensus. Comparison of canine and human demographic histories places domestication in Siberia around 23,000 years ago, during the last glacial maximum; ancient wolf genomes relate dogs to eastern Eurasian wolves, with a second south-western contribution interpreted either as an independent domestication or as later admixture. Attributions of Palaeolithic dogs going back 40,000 years widen the older bound, while the deep divergence between East Asian and western Eurasian dogs is dated only to between 14,000 and 6,400 years.

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