Biologist Drake helps answer key question in canine history [Dog Domestication]

Skidmore College ^ | February 5, 2015 | press release (via Archaeology)

[SunkenCiv]

When did dogs first become domesticated? A sophisticated new 3D fossil analysis by biologists Abby Grace Drake, visiting assistant professor of biology at Skidmore, and Michael Coquerelle of the University Rey Juan Carlos contradicts the suggested domestication of dogs during the late Paleolithic era (about 30,000 years ago), and reestablishes the date of domestication to around 15,000 years ago...

Whether dogs were domesticated during the Paleolithic era, when humans were hunter-gatherers, or the Neolithic era, when humans began to form permanent settlements and take up farming, is a subject of ongoing scientific debate. Original fossil finds placed dog domestication in the Neolithic, during the time when humans began to form permanent settlements and started to farm. However, genetic analyses have often contradicted this date, claiming that dogs were domesticated much earlier. Recent fossils found in Russia and Belgium have been used as evidence for dogs being domesticated as early as the late Paleolithic, when humans were hunter-gatherers...

Drake and Coquerelle proposed a 3D method for measuring the canid skulls and re-assessed the Paleolithic fossils from Russia and Belgium. When they compared the form of these canids to that of modern and ancient wolves and dogs from North America and Europe, they were surprised to find that these fossils, once presumed to be dogs, were in fact wolves.

[BigEdLB]

Emma