An international team of researchers, including members from Sapienza University, has published a new study in Nature revealing the oldest genetic evidence of dogs' existence. Through ancient DNA analysis, the researchers identified dogs at archaeological sites in the UK and Turkey that date back to the Late Upper Palaeolithic period, around 16,000–14,000 years ago.

Scientists already knew that dogs are descended from grey wolf populations and suspected that this had occurred during the last ice age. However, evidence from pre-agricultural archaeological sites has been limited and difficult to confirm.

Furthermore, in the early stages of domestication, the skeletons of dogs and wolves were probably indistinguishable, and behavioural differences left no archaeological evidence. The study suggests that dogs may have been transferred between genetically and culturally distinct groups, including the Epigravettian and Magdalenian communities of Europe.

While previous studies have mainly relied on very short DNA sequences and skeletal measurements, this new study involved researchers from 17 institutions reconstructing complete genomes from more than 10,000-year-old archaeological remains taken from Upper Palaeolithic sites, including Gough's Cave in the UK and Pınarbaşı in Turkey. The researchers then compared these genomes with those of over 1,000 modern and ancient dogs and wolves from around the world.

These analyses confirmed that the bones belonged to dogs and revealed that the oldest direct evidence of their existence dates back more than 5,000 years. Re-analysing previous data also showed that dogs were likely widely present among Epigravettian and Magdalenian hunter-gatherer communities in Europe towards the end of the Ice Age.

These new genetic data reveal that the individuals from Gough’s Cave and Pınarbaşı were dogs. They were also found to be more closely related to the ancestors of modern European and Middle Eastern breeds, such as boxers and salukis, than to Arctic breeds, such as Siberian huskies. This suggests that the main genetic lineages of modern dogs must have formed by the Upper Palaeolithic period.

‘Sapienza’s contribution to this study,’ - says Dušan Borić, a Department of Environmental Biology researcher and one of the study’s authors - ‘relates to evidence of dogs among Mesolithic hunter-gatherer-fisher communities at the Vlasac and Padina sites, which are located in the Danube Gorge region between present-day Serbia and Romania. Genetic analyses provide a diachronic perspective on the history of dogs in Eurasia, suggesting a long and complex history of interaction between dogs and humans.”

References: Dogs Were Widely Distributed Across Western Eurasia During the Palaeolithic. Marsh, W.A., Scarsbrook, L., Yüncü, E., Hodgson, L., Lin, A.T., De Iorio, M., Thalmann, O., Thomas, M.G., Bergström, A., Noseda, A., Amiri, S., Biglari, F., Borić, D., Bougiouri, K., Carmagnini, A., Giann., M., Higham, T., Lebrasseur, O., Linderholm, A., Mannino, M.A., Middleton, C., Mustafaoğlu, G., Perri, A., Peters, J., Richards, M., Sarıtaş, Ö., Skoglund, P., Stevens, R.E., Stringer, C., Tabbada, K., Talbot, H.M., Van der Sluis, L.G., Bello, S.M., Dimitrijevic, V., Martin, L., Mashkour, M., Parfitt, S.A., Vukovic, S., Brace, S., Craig, O.E., Baird, D., Charlton, S., Larson, G., Barnes, I., and Frantz, L.A.F. (2026) Nature 651: 995–1003. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10170-x

Further Information

Dušan Borić - Department of Environmental Biology

dusan.boric@uniroma1.it