18,000-year-old Puppy was a Good Dogor

A frozen dog has been unearthed in Siberia in amazingly fresh condition. They named him Dogor, which means “friend” in Yakutian. Scientists believe he was about two months old at his death. They are not sure if he was an ice age wolf, a modern wolf, a domestic dog, or possibly something in between.

While the work has managed to discover the specimen is male and approximately 18,000 years old, preliminary genome sequencing was unable to tell whether it is a wolf, a dog, or perhaps a proto-dog common ancestor of the two.

“The Centre has Europe’s largest DNA bank of all canines from around the globe, yet in this case they couldn’t identify it from the first try,” Love Dalén, professor of evolutionary genetics at the CPG, told The Siberian Times.

“This is intriguing, what if it’s a dog? We can’t wait to get results from further tests,” added Sergey Fedorov from the Institute of Applied Ecology of the North at the North-Eastern Federal University in Yakutsk.

Humans started to settle in this northern part of Russia around 32,500 years ago. Furthermore, previous research has suggested that humans domesticated dogs from wolves some 10,000 to 40,000 years ago. This means that Dogor could, in theory, fit anywhere within this range as a loyal household dog, a ravenous wild wolf, or anything in between.

The only thing everyone can agree on is that he was a good boy. -via Metafilter


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