An ancient friend of man

Studies of the International Scientific Group, which included S.N.S. Institute of Geology and Mineralogy. Sobolev SB RAS, doct. Geogr. Sciences Yaroslav Vsevolodovich Kuzmin , allowed us to clarify the dating of the skull of a dog found in a cave of a robber (Ust-Kansky district of the Republic of Gorny Altai). According to new data, this dog is the oldest in Asia: scientists believe that it is at least 33.5 thousand years old.

The opening is reported in the article “The original dog with an age of 33,000 years from the Altai Mountains, Siberia: evidence of the oldest domestication interrupted by the maximum of the last glaciation” published in the journal PLOS ONE July 28 ( www.plosone.org/article/info%3adoi%2F10.1371%2FJURNAL.PONE.0022821 ).

As Ya.V. Kuzmin, the story of the find itself originates in the 1970s, when the famous paleontologist Nikolai Dmitrievich Zlotov , who then worked at the Institute of History, Philology and Philology with the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (now-the Institute of Archeology and Ethnography of the SB RAS), began studying the Cave of the Robber on the subject of the fossil fauna. He found a large number of the remains of ancient animals: a wolf, cave hyena, a brown bear, a fox, rodents, a mountain goat, as well as a full skull of a dog. All the bones were in excellent preservation. To answer the most important question about when this dog lived in the foothills of Altai, scientists used a radiocarbon analysis, with the help of which in the 1980s a date was received by the bones of a brown bear, which were lying next to the dog skull: about 18 thousand years ago.

However, in the early 2000s with Y.V. Kuzmin, who connected to the work of N.D. Ovodova, experts in animal genetics from the German Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology of the Max Planck society contacted - they became interested in material from the cave and made a proposal to collect a collection of bones and teeth of ancient wolves to study their DNA. Among the remains sent to Germany, there were several teeth from the same layer of the robber in which the skull of the dog was found. As a result of the studies, new radiocarbon dates were received, much more ancient than earlier (about 52 thousand years), and these data convinced N.D. Ovodova and Y.V. Kuzmina is that you need to carry out direct radiocarbon dating of the skull.

“ Why was this not done before? In the 1970-80s, to obtain such a date on the skull of the dog, it would have to be sacrificed at least half of this valuable copy (a radiocarbon analysis by its nature destroys the dating object). Nowadays, only about one gram of the sample is required for dating the method of accelerating mass spectrometry (UMS) , ”Ya.V. explains Kuzmin.

Since in Russia there are no laboratories working on the principle of UMS so far, Yaroslav Vsevolodovich turned to the Laboratory of the accelerating mass spectrometry of the University of Arizona (USA), with which he has been cooperating for many years. “ In the spring of 2008, a piece of bone selected by N.D. The ovodov from the skull, a date was received - about 34 thousand years. It turned out that this is the oldest dog in the world; Previously, this was considered the find in the parking lot of Eliseevichi in the Bryansk regions, dated about 17 thousand years. In order to be finally confident in the reliability of the age, in the summer of 2008 we selected additional samples and offered to participate in control dating to two colleagues from the best UMS-laboratories of the world-Thomas Hayem from the University of Oxford (Great Britain) and Johannes Van Der Pliht from the University of Groningen (Netherlands). For a complete description of the find of the oldest dog and the analysis of its morphology (sizes and forms), Suzan Crocord from the University of Victoria (Victoria, the province of British Colombia, Canada) was invited. In 2009, additional UMS-dates on the jaw of the dog from the robber cave were received-and again about 33.5 thousand years! - says J. V. Kuzmin. -For objectivity, it must be said that in 2009, in the journal Journal of Archaeological Science, an article by a group of researchers from Belgium, Russia, Great Britain and Germany was published, which announced the finding of a home dog in the Goyet cave in Belgium with a UMS date of about 36.5 thousand years. True, the authors did not give the morphological parameters of the find (i.e. it cannot be compared with our Siberian dog), and the skull itself has been preserved much worse than in a robber cave, and yet, according to S. Crokford, this find can also be recognized as an ancient dog. Thus, today two ancient dogs are known in the world - in Belgium and in Altai, living about 33.5–36.5 thousand years ago . "

According to morphological analysis, the Altai dog was unequivocally different from the modern wolves: in the form of the skull, obvious changes are visible (this is considered the most important criterion for separating a home dog from wild ancestors), which indicates that 33-34 thousand years ago, the process of dositication of these animals in Altai has already gone far quite far. The individual found in Siberia is very close to a prehistoric dog from Greenland, but the age of the latter is only about a thousand years old.

Thus, the new data obtained by the international team allow us to refute the existing ideas about the place of origin of the home dog - East Asia or Africa. “ It is obvious that the process of domestication took place in the distant past repeatedly and in different parts of the globe, since the wild ancestor of the dog - the wolf - lived everywhere,” said J. V. Kuzmin, “however, a decrease in the degree of sedentary of a person, which was absolutely necessary for the tag of a dog, as the climate worsened in the anticipation of the maximum of the last global lumbagonal, which began about 26 thousand years ago, made the process of domestication impossible. Only as the warmest natural conditions occurred (about 17-18 thousand years ago), people were able again, this time completely, taming the dog - the first pet. We hope that future research will show how justify this preliminary model is . ”

Ekaterina Pustolyakova,
Siberian branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences,
Center for Public Relations