Now scientists have found that many of these animals were indeed dogs. Ancient DNA analysis of bones found in England, Switzerland, and Turkey reveals that the remains belong to dogs that lived between 14,000 and 16,000 years ago. The oldest dog is a puppy unearthed at a hunter-gatherer site known as Pinarbasi in central Turkey. At about 15,800 years old, it’s the oldest genetically confirmed dog to date, pushing back the definitive origin of dogs nearly 5000 years.

Remarkably, all of the dogs from these various regions are very similar genetically, suggesting they may represent the ancestral form of all dogs, at least in Europe. Greger Larson, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Oxford, an an author on the new work, suggests they may have been like a “Swiss Army knife”–able to perform a wide variety of jobs for a wide variety of peoples.

These people also appeared to treat their dogs in a way that would be familiar to many of us today. The Pinarbasi puppy was buried near humans, suggesting that these hunter-gatherers may have viewed them as a fellow member of their society. And a dog jaw bone recovered from the English site–known as Gough’s Cave–shows signs of piercing after the animal died. The people here made cups from human skulls, and the piercing of the dog bone suggests they treated their canine companions similar to how they treated their fellow humans.

The work doesn’t solve the ultimate mystery of where and when dogs arose, but it does suggest that our canine pals have been with us a long, long time–and that our relationship with them has always been special.

The Ancient Egyptian goddess Bastet. (Credit: Eternal Space, Wikimedia Commons).

Cats and dogs are about as different as… well… cats and dogs. But one thing they have in common, at least from a scientific perspective, is that researchers don’t know exactly where or when either one arose. Scholars had long assumed that Ancient Egypt birthed the domestic cat, thanks to the plethora of felines in the art and religion of the famed civilization. But over the last couple of decades, the focus has shifted hundreds of kilometers north—and thousands of years earlier in time.

Archaeological finds—including the discovery of a human apparently buried with a feline under a 9500-year-old home on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus—have created a narrative that goes something like this: Early farmers in what is perhaps today’s Turkey grew crops, which attracted rodents, which attracted wildcats. As these cats slunk into human villages, the tamest would have been tolerated (and perhaps cared for) by people, evolving over the generations into the housecats we know today. It’s a nice story, and one I’ve told myself in both my book and in various articles.

But two new studies find no evidence that cats arose this early, or in this part of the Mediterranean. Those earlier “cats” were not domestic cats at all, the teams find, but rather European wildcats, a bulkier species not closely related to either domestic cats or their direct ancestor, the African wildcat. Absent these felines, Ancient Egypt returns to the limelight. But when? And how?

That remains an open question. Though one of the studies argues for a gruesome tale that goes something like this: The popularity of a cult worshipping the Egyptian goddess Bastet in the first millennium BCE lead to a huge demand for cat mummies, which required a huge amount of cat sacrifices, which required a huge amount of cats, which required that cats literally be herded in massive numbers into small areas. Those cats most suited to live around other cats—and humans—would have become tamer over the generations, eventually evolving into the furballs we know today. The authors call it the “murder pathway of domestication.”

It’s very likely that this isn’t the final word on the matter. For one, there is evidence of domestic cats in Egypt hundreds of years before this cat cult arose. For another, there’s no evidence of this domestication pathway, just speculation. So for now, cats and dogs continue to share origins that remain deeply shrouded in mystery.

Leopard cats were on the “doorstep to domestication” in China before housecats moved it. (Credit: Kuribo / Wikimedia Commons.)

We tend to take cats and dogs for granted. Maybe it’s because they’re everywhere. Maybe it’s because we just can’t imagine any other animals as such beloved companions. But could we have ended up with pet foxes or badgers instead?

It’s a mystery I’ve written about before: Given that a host of other wild animals lived in close proximity to humans thousands of years ago, why did only gray wolves and the African wildcat evolve into our most treasured companions? As Melinda Zeder, an archaeozoologist at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History, says, “It’s the million-dollar question.”

Was there something just inherently special about the ancestors of dogs and cats? A new study adds further evidence that this may be the case. Researchers investigating how housecats first made it to China have discovered–via a genetic analysis of nearly two dozen ancient specimens from the country–that felines arrived there about 1400 years ago, carried by traders from the West along the famed Silk Road.

Curiously, these domestic cats replaced another feline species that was on the “doorstep to domestication,” as Zeder calls it. Thousands of years before housecats arrived in China, leopard cats lived in close proximity to humans in early farming villages. Like African wildcats, they appear to have been drawn into these settlements by rodents, which were in turn drawn in by grain. And like African wildcats, this close proximity to people appears to have placed them on the path to self-domestication.

Yet leopard cats mysteriously disappeared from human contexts in China hundreds of years before housecats came in from the West. What happened to them?

Their disappearance coincides with the end of the eastern Han dynasty, a chaotic period when warfare and climate change would have eliminated many of the settlements–and people–the leopard cat had come to rely on. When things eventually restabilized, any leopard cats that approached human towns and villages would have discovered that housecats had taken their place. Another thing working against leopard cats: They are notorious killers of chickens, says says Shu-Jin Luo, a geneticist at Peking University who oversaw the research, even earning the nickname “chicken killer tiger”. As such, they would have been felis non grata in a world increasingly reliant on poultry farming.

And thus, yet another potential pet fell by the wayside as cats and dogs continued their ascent into our hearts, and eventually into our homes. So, back to my original question: Why cats and dogs? Were their ancestors more adaptable to human society? Were they more chill than their rivals? Was it just good luck? The leopard cat example suggests all three may have been at play. One thing we know for sure, says Zeder: “There’s clearly something special about these two species.”

Hello kitty? The Scottish wildcat looks a lot like domestic cats. (Credit: pipilongstockings / Wikimedia Commons)

When I wrote my book, Citizen Canine, nearly 10 years ago, one of the first things I covered was an unusual case in Scotland. It seems that in 1990 a gamekeeper had shot three cats on a grouse moor. His aim, as it were, was to protect the birds from felines so that they could be killed by hunters instead. He was within his rights–assuming that his targets were domestic cats. But witnesses took him to court, claiming that he had killed endangered Scottish wildcats instead. The two animals look remarkably similar (as you can see from the picture) so only DNA could tell whether the hunter had broken the law. The problem? No one had a genetic way to distinguish the two felines.

Cases like this led to one the most important finds in cat science: A rigorous analysis of domestic cat DNA revealed that all of our kitties had descended from the African–or Near Easter–wildcat. The research also led to a way to genetically tell Scottish wildcats and domestic cats apart. And that, in turn, has recently revealed something tragic.

Two new studies of domestic felines and wildcats based on modern and ancient DNA find that the Scottish wildcat is effectively extinct. Though domestic cats and wildcats in Europe appear to have cohabitated for thousands of years without interbreeding, something changed in Scotland about 70 years ago. Declining prey and loss of habitat appear to have driven the few Scottish wildcats left to mate with domestic cats. Today, the DNA of Scottish wildcats is so corrupted by domestic cat DNA that all that exists in nature is a “hybrid swarm”–felines with a confused mix of wild and domestic DNA.

There is a small shred of hope. Scottish wildcats kept in captivity since the 1960s could help repopulate the animal in the wild. But even these felines have some domestic DNA, so it could take several generations for them to become pure wildcats, if that’s even possible. As for the gamekeeper, the court couldn’t prove that he had shot Scottish wildcats, and it was forced to drop the case. Perhaps the wildcat will fare better in the hands of conservationists.

Me and a wolf named Wotan at Wolf Park. (Credit: Wolf Park)

About 10 years ago, I visited one of the most unique sanctuaries in North America. I was reporting for my book, Citizen Canine–specifically a chapter about how the wolf became the dog. Experts agree that gray wolves gave rise to today’s dogs, but just how this happened is a mystery. Equally enigmatic is how much dogs changed over the course of this transformation. Did the ability to obey commands and follow human pointing arise only in dogs, for exampel? Or were flickers of these abilities present in their wolf ancestors? Ditto for the incredible bond between dogs and humans. Were wolves also capable of such attachment?

I had come to Wolf Park to find out just how different these two animals are. The sanctuary, 70 miles northwest of Indiana, is one of the few places in the world you can get up close and personal with wolves. I was lucky enough to spend some time face-to-face with the animals. As I write in my book:

When I enter the park, I’m directed to a safety training seminar. That’s my first clue that I’m not dealing with a domesticated animal. The second is the chain-linked fence topped with razor wire that separates the wolves from everyone else. As I walk along a dirt path that leads from the visitor’s center to the beige bunkhouse where the safety briefing will be held, I catch my first glimpse of a wolf. There, on the other side of the fence, stands a small black female, her eyes glowing yellow, her ears on alert. She’s staring at me, and not in a way that makes me feel comfortable. Despite what I’ve heard about the similarities between wolves and dogs, there’s nothing dog-like about this animal. She’s cold, she’s tense, and she clearly doesn’t want me here. 

All of this, and these animals had been hand-raised by people since they were just two weeks old. Clearly, there is a huge gap between dogs and wolves.

And yet, over the past couple of decades, researchers have shown that wolves are capable of some behaviors scientists once thought were exclusive to dogs. With a lot of training, wolves can follow human pointing. They can even play fetch.

Now, a new study, suggests that wolves are capable of dog-like attachment to humans. When researchers placed hand-raised wolves in a room with a caregiver and a complete stranger–in an experiment known as the Strange Situation Test–and then had these people enter and exit the room at various points, the animals showed more preference for their caregiver: They were more likely to greet this person and make physical contact with them. They even seemed to calm down more when this person entered the room, suggesting that the animals viewed the humans who raised them as a “social buffer”–a source of comfort and support.

Not everyone is convinced by the work. But if true, it suggests that seeds of many of the abilities we once thought were unique to dogs were in fact present in their ancestors. That’s not terribly surprising, as evolution needs something to act on: traits rarely arise out of thin air.

Given all of this, however, it’s unlikely that the wolves that gave rise to dogs were anything like our canine pals. My visit to Wolf Park attests to that. But it does suggest that ancient humans may have gravitated towards the abilities we now favor in dogs–and strengthened them over the course of thousands of years of domestication. And bit by bit, these once-wild animals eventually became the lovable pooches we know today.

Barking up a big tree. (Credit: Ahmed Mateo, Wikimedia Commons)

Dogs vary more in size than any other mammal on earth, from teacup-sized Chihuahuas to towering Great Danes. Most of this extreme variation has arisen over the past two centuries with the rise of modern dog breeding.  But Victorian dog fanciers didn’t create these breeds out of whole cloth, a new study finds. Instead, they hijacked two tiny genetic changes that have been present in the ancestors of dogs since at least the last Ice Age.  The study, which I cover this week in Science,  doesn’t just help explain why dogs are among the most malleable creatures on the planet. It may also elucidate how and why the sizes of wolves and their relatives have changed over evolutionary history.

A 19th-century sketch of the Japanese wolf. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Where and when did dogs arise? It’s one of the greatest mysteries of domestication, and one that remains unresolved despite decades of study.

Scientists know that all modern dogs descend from a population of gray wolves. But exactly who these wolves were and where they lived has been unclear. And thus, so has the origins of dogs.

Now, a new study of Japanese wolves may be providing some answers. This mysterious animal lived in Japan for thousands of years, but humans wiped it out about a century ago. In a new study, a team of Japanese researchers sequenced ancient DNA from nine Japanese wolves and 11 dogs, and compared them to the sequences of a variety of other canids. The data suggest that Japanese wolves are more closely related to dogs than are any other wolves. More importantly, the DNA suggests that the ancestor of the dog and the Japanese wolf was the same: A population of gray wolves that lived in East Asia, and which has likely vanished.

In all, the study suggests that dogs arose in East Asia, though the timing is still unclear. The location jibes with two proposed locations of dog domestication: Northeastern Siberia and Southeast Asia. It also seems to rule out a European or Middle Eastern origin, which some researchers had posited.

More work will be needed to seal the deal, and to say whether this is one canine case that’s finally been closed.

The Chinese mountain cat. (Credit: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=31346955)

Unlike the ongoing mystery of where and when dogs arose, the history of cats is a less convoluted affair. Most scholars agree–based on both archaeological and genetic evidence–that domestic cats likely arose in the Middle East some 10,000 years ago.

Still, there have been hints that the cat story may not be as simple as it seems. In 2016, scientists reported evidence of a possible second domestication of cats–one that took place thousands of years later in China. Unlike the first cats, which descend from the African wildcat, these Asian kitties appear to have evolved from the leopard cat. Whatever happened, they didn’t last long; there’s no trace of them in today’s housecats. But the study did raise the intriguing possibility that cats may have been independently domesticated in Asia, as some argue happened with dogs.

New research appears to put that notion to rest. The largest genetic analysis of Chinese cats–including domestic cats, the Asiatic wildcat, and the mysterious Chinese mountain cat–finds that all domestic cats in the country are genetically indistinguishable from those elsewhere in the world. The researchers did find some Chinese mountain cat DNA in domestic cats, but that’s likely because the two have begun to interbreed as more and humans (and their cats) have shown up in the Tibetan Plateau–the realm of the Chinese mountain cat.

If the new study does have anything to say about domestic cats it’s that they may pose a threat to local wildcats. If domestic cat DNA begins to show up in the DNA of the Chinese mountain cat–an animal already considered vulnerable because of its low numbers and threats from humans–it could corrupt the genome of this unique creature, eventually scrubbing it from existence. A similar situation played out with the Scottish wildcat, which some now consider “functionally extinct” due to interbreeding with domestic cats.

Efforts are underway to save the Chinse mountain cats. But it remains to be seen if these felines will stand the test of time.

A cat wearing a bronze collar found in the Berenice pet cemetery. (Credit: M. Osypinska)

Ancient pet cemeteries are rare. Archaeologists do find dog and cat burials, sometimes dating back 10,000 years or more. But these creatures are typically interred alone, or with people, in one-offs–not in a dedicated burial ground. Researchers have also unearthed dozens of cat mummies and hundreds of dogs in single locations, but these appear to have been ritualistic burials; the animals were sacrificed or being honored for some sort of spiritual reason.

So a new find of nearly 600 cats and dogs buried in southwestern Egypt in what appears to be a bona-fide pet cemetery is exceptional. The animals were interred in single graves over the course of about a hundred years–from the mid 1st century to the mid 2nd century CE–and they were not sacrificed nor mummified. Instead, they appear to have been lovingly buried, often with collars or other jewelry, and protected by textiles or pieces of pottery. Many also appear to have survived sometimes serious injuries and disease, implying that people at this site–known as Berenice–may have cared for them much like we care for our pets today.

That’s especially remarkable, because this is a period of human history when pets are typically seen as working animals. And the residents of Berenice–merchants, slaves, and soldiers–would seem to have had little time for pet keeping, especially in this rough, isolated region. Did they love their cats and dogs because they hunted mice or guarded their homes? Or did they have a deeper, non-utilitarian connection with them, like many of us do today? With more research, such questions may not be lost to the sands of time.

Photo by PIXNIO

Given our deep and enduring relationship with dogs, it’s remarkable that scientists still don’t know where our canine pals came from, or when they arose. Researchers have speculated that dogs evolved everywhere from Southeast Asia to the Middle East, and that they may even have been domesticated more than once.

Now scientists are proposing a new time and place: Northeast Siberia, around 23,000 years ago. The work is based on mitochondrial DNA recovered from ancient dogs, which the researchers then compared to DNA from ancient humans. Where the patterns matched, the team was able to reconstruct the history of dogs all the way–possibly–to the beginning.

The study resolves several mysteries around doggy origins. Not only does it give a putative time and place, it also helps explain why dogs seem to appear in Europe and the Americas around the same time–15,000 years ago–which has led some to propose multiple domestications. The idea is that a group of people known as the Ancient North Siberians domesticated dogs and then traded them to people traveling both east and west. These animals would have been invaluable as hunters, guardians, and–perhaps most importantly–sled dogs, helping people travel vast distances and carry heavy kills back to camp.

The study also addresses another big canine conundrum: How dogs were domesticated in the first place. The prevailing idea has been that gray wolves inched closer and closer to human campsites to scavenge food, with the least timid ones evolving—over hundreds or thousands of years—into the gentle pups we know today. But the scenario doesn’t work if humans are traveling so far and wide that they’re always encountering different populations of wolves. It just so happens that the Ancient North Siberians were stuck in northeastern Siberia for thousands of years, because the harsh climate of the last Ice Age prevented them from traveling too far east or west. That may have given these humans time to turn the wolf into the dog–or for wolves to turn themselves into dogs, as many believe that dogs self-domesticated.

This isn’t likely to be the last word on where dogs came from. But for now, it’s an intriguing piece of the puzzle.