A group of archaeologists discovered that we were friends with dogs before they even existed. Man was already friends with his ancestors: wolves that were domesticated.
“We now have evidence that canids and people had close relationships earlier than we knew in the Americas,” he said. François Lanoëresearch assistant professor in the School of Anthropology at the University of Arizona.
The researcher and colleagues, by analyzing archaeological remains in Alaska, discovered that the people and ancestors of today’s dogs began their friendly relationship around 12 thousand years agotells .
“People who are interested in the origins of the Americas They want to know if the first Americans came with dogs. Until we find these animals at archaeological sites, we can speculate about it, but it’s difficult to prove one way or the other. Therefore, this is a significant contribution.”
The discovery of a canine leg bone was the starting point for the discovery. THE radiocarbon dating allowed us to understand how old the animal was, and through chemical analysis bones, it was the animals’ diet that allowed us to realize that they were domesticated.
The analysis identified salmon proteins, suggesting the canine ate fish regularly. This fact was not typical of canids at the time, which exclusively hunted terrestrial animals, which suggests human interference.
Still, the co-author of the published in Science Advances this week, Ben Potter alerts us to a problem in this dating of friendship between humans and dogs: these animals were not really dogs.
They acted and looked like dogs, but genetically they are different, and the ones we know now emerged only later. Researchers say the skeletal remains found may belong to domesticated wolves, rather than dogs themselves.
Still, this is the first evidence ever found that ancestors of today’s dogs maintained close relationships with people in the Americas.
