Jean-Baptiste Fourvrel
An “extremely rare” skeleton of an animal similar to a dog raises more doubts than answers about humans’ behavior in the face of this living being.
Scientists discovered a “extremely rare” skeleton of a kind of dog with 16 thousand years (According to radiocarbon dating), in southern France. It is a female, which would be about 26 pounds.
“It is possible that the individual has been injured because he was beaten or hit by people“It begins by explaining scientist Loukas Koungoulos to.
“Thanks to its complete preservation, We were able to compare various elements of the skeleton with those of wolves and dogs fossils and modern, ”says Mietje GermonPré, also involved in the Quaternary Science Reviews.
The animal will then belong to the group of Paleolithic dogswhich is believed to represent an initial phase of the domestication process.
“Paleolithic humans began to collect the knees of the burrows and raise them at home as ‘pets’ in a domesticated state,” explains Koungoulos.
This animal had several broken vertebrae that had healed, which indicates that It may have been treated by humans.
Apparently this was a domestic animal… But there is also evidence that it has been mistreated by humans.
“The piercings in the shoulder blade were observed in hunted hunted animals during the mesolithic until the early historical times, suggesting that people pointed their projectiles – spears and arrows – to this part of their body,” says Koungoulos.
The team now wants to investigate the relationship of this animal with modern dogs, and try to understand how it interacted with humans.
