Life is more fun for many people when you're a dog parent, and they play a big part in overall happiness. They give unconditional love, are great at motivating us, and quickly become important besties in our circle. But have you ever wondered how dogs became a man's best friend? And when?
A new study is shining a light on just how long humans and dogs have been best friends, and it's incredibly fascinating! Here's what we know.
A new paper published in Science Advances this month suggests that dogs and people have had a relationship way earlier than we thought -- 2,000 years earlier.
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According to Smithsonian Magazine, how long dogs have been a part of life with people has puzzled scientists because collecting scientific proof through "fossilized canine remains."
However, research cited by the magazine suggests that dogs, the ones we know today, evolved from Gray Wolves about 15,000 years ago during the last Ice Age. Humans might have first domesticated wolves in Asia, Europe, the Middle East, or independently in several locations," the magazine writes.
However, there has been a lot of curiosity about how long people in the Americas have had a companion relationship with dogs. This latest study starts to build a clearer picture of how far back the relationship may have been in the early stages.
A research team led by Dr. François Lanoë, an assistant research professor at the University of Arizona School of Anthropology, published their archaeological findings from Alaska that bring science closer to answering the question: "Did the first humans who arrived in North and South America bring dogs with them? Or did they befriend wild wolves after they arrived?"
In the new study, the research team examined 76 different "candid specimens," including wolves, coyotes, dogs, and hybrid wolfdogs, found in Alaska archaeological sites over the years. The team also included modern wolf specimens living in the same area to analyze their genomes and older specimens.
In 2018, the team discovered a lower leg bone from 12,000 years ago during one of their Alaskan archaeological dig sites. In 2023, the team unearthed an 8,100-year-old canine jawbone during another dig at a nearby site. Both bones show signs of possible domestication, way earlier than first believed.
The analysis discovered that some of the specimens ate more salmon than others. Given that it's very unlikely the early canines hunted the salmon in their diet, it suggests that these dogs depended on people for their food.
"This is the smoking gun because they're not really going after salmon in the wild," Ben Potter, an archaeologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, shared in a University of Arizona release. "It asks the existential question, what is a dog?"
The specimens are not genetically similar to modern dogs. Still, the discovery of salmon in their diet suggests that the canids from thousands of years ago may have eaten and behaved like the dogs we know today.
According to Lanoë, this study "shows that canid-people relationships were complex, continue to be today, and involve more than domestication but also things like taming of wild wolves and commensality (wolves hanging around human settlements)."
Lanoë continues, "We now have evidence that canids and people had close relationships earlier than we knew they did in the Americas."
There is still so much to learn and discover about the early canids and many more questions to answer, but this new finding suggests that dogs and people have been besties for a very long time.