Ancient DNA recovered from archaeological excavations in central Türkiye has revealed some of the earliest genetic evidence of domestic dogs, providing new insights into how dogs developed close relationships with humans and spread rapidly across prehistoric Europe and Anatolia.
The discoveries come from the sites of Pınarbaşı and Boncuklu, excavated through projects involving the University of Liverpool and the British Institute at Ankara (BIAA), and are detailed in two related studies published in Nature.
The research brings together archaeologists, zooarchaeologists, ancient DNA specialists and isotope researchers from institutions in the UK, Türkiye and Germany. The two sites span a crucial period in human history, from the Epipalaeolithic, or latest Palaeolithic, into the early Neolithic, covering roughly 16,000 to 10,000 years ago. Together, the findings suggest that dogs were already closely integrated into human communities well before the emergence and spread of farming.
At the Epipalaeolithic rockshelter of Pınarbaşı, where mobile hunter-gatherers repeatedly camped and buried their dead, researchers identified the remains of dog puppies using ancient nuclear DNA. Dating to around 15,800 years ago, the animals are among the earliest dogs to have been directly identified genetically rather than classified through more indirect evidence such as skeletal appearance.
The archaeological evidence indicates that the dogs occupied a particularly close place within the human community. The puppies were deliberately buried in the rockshelter near human burials, while isotope analysis suggests they ate fish, which was also an important component of the human diet. Professor Douglas Baird of the University of Liverpool said the evidence makes clear that the dogs were close human companions, receiving carefully ritualised treatment at death comparable with that afforded to people.
Dogs may also have played practical roles within these hunter-gatherer communities. The people who occupied Pınarbaşı hunted wild sheep and large, potentially dangerous cattle, and Baird suggested the animals were likely to have assisted with hunting. They may also have acted as guard dogs in a landscape inhabited by large predators including wolves and leopards.
The genetic evidence becomes particularly significant when Pınarbaşı is compared with Gough’s Cave in Britain. Researchers studying late Upper Palaeolithic canids from Gough’s Cave found a high degree of genetic similarity between the British specimens and the dogs from central Anatolia. Dr William Marsh, a postdoctoral researcher at the Natural History Museum and co-first author of the study, described the genetic identification of the Palaeolithic dogs from Gough’s Cave and Pınarbaşı as a “step-change” in understanding the earliest history of dogs.
The discoveries allowed researchers to identify additional ancient dogs from sites in Germany, Italy and Switzerland, showing that dogs were already widely distributed across Europe and Türkiye by at least 14,000 years ago. The close genetic relationship between animals found at opposite ends of Europe suggests this dog lineage spread across the continent extremely rapidly, possibly within only a few centuries. Significantly, dogs appear to have moved between human populations that were themselves culturally and genetically distinct, suggesting the animals were valued sufficiently to cross boundaries between different communities.
Baird suggested that dogs may have spread partly because of their practical value to human groups and partly through exchanges between communities, while the animals’ own movements and behaviour may also have contributed. The genetic research further indicates that these early dogs contributed ancestry to modern European dogs, connecting the Palaeolithic animals with much later dog populations.
The second Nature paper examines evidence from Boncuklu, approximately 30 kilometres from Pınarbaşı, where domestic dogs have been identified from around 9000 BC. By this point, at the beginning of the Holocene following the end of the Ice Age, the descendants of the people associated with Pınarbaşı had begun living permanently in the wetlands. These communities eventually adopted domesticated plants and began managing wild sheep in the surrounding hills.
Dogs continued to hold an important position within these increasingly settled communities. As at Pınarbaşı, they were deliberately buried, but at Boncuklu some dogs were placed directly alongside humans. They may have continued to serve as hunting and guard dogs, while the emergence of early sheep management raises the possibility that they also began to play a role in livestock herding.
The research also sheds light on what happened when farming communities later expanded from Anatolia into Europe. Around 2,500 years after the initial occupation of Boncuklu, the first farmers began spreading into Europe from western Anatolia. These people were genetically related to the populations represented at Boncuklu and took Anatolian dogs with them as they moved westwards.
However, the genetic history of the dogs did not precisely mirror that of their human companions. The Anatolian-derived Neolithic dogs interbred with dogs associated with indigenous European Mesolithic hunter-gatherers to a greater degree than the incoming farming populations mixed with local human groups. Researchers argue that this provides further evidence that dogs were able to move across cultural boundaries and were highly valued by otherwise distinct communities.
Taken together, the discoveries at Pınarbaşı and Boncuklu suggest that the close relationship between humans and dogs was firmly established thousands of years before agriculture transformed societies across Europe and Anatolia. By the late Ice Age, dogs were sharing elements of the human diet, receiving deliberate burials and travelling between communities across enormous distances. As people later established permanent settlements, adopted farming and began managing livestock, dogs remained alongside them, adapting to new roles while continuing a relationship with humans that had already developed deep roots in the Palaeolithic.
Header Image Credit : Kathryn Killackey
Sources : BIAA
