Beth Shapiro

I think dog domestication is one of those places where both we come to terms with what we don't know and the opportunity to discover new things.

The very first scientific paper that said when dogs were domesticated was

looked at a type of DNA that's only inherited from your mom called mitochondrial DNA.

Our cells have a nucleus that has the DNA in our chromosomes that make us look and act the way we do, and then it has little cells that were once bacteria that we co-opted that make energy.

And you only inherit them from your mom, and there's a ton of them, like there's thousands of mitochondrial genomes in every cell and only one of your nuclear genomes.

So in ancient DNA,

because there's way more we started just with that it was the only thing we could recover and the first dog mitochondrial genomes that were recovered people were like dogs were domesticated in asia 150 000 years ago which is clearly wrong right there weren't human populations societies which is kind of what you need for dog domestication because they're attracted to the garbage or the living around where people were so you need communities of people that are staying in place together for some time before you can have dog domestication

We don't, but we do know now that dogs probably aren't that old.

I think it changes all the time, which is because we don't know everything.

And also probably because the first dogs were in warm parts of the world, and so we don't have the fossils.

We don't have the DNA, and the fossils just didn't preserve.

Oh, really?

I think right now what people are happiest with is that it was probably sometime after the peak of the last ice age, sometime 15,000 to 20,000 years ago.

And I'm not sure where because, again, probably in a warmer spot.

There's been lots of gene flow, lots of hybridization between domestic dogs and wolves that have made this a really hard problem.

Right.

Exactly like that.

But what's cool about this date, 15,000 to 20,000 years ago, is that most of these people are like, yeah, that's probably the date for dogs.

Which means if dogs only form when there are human communities that are together, groups of people that are living together in the same place for a long time, that they were around 15,000 to 20,000 years ago.

That is not what archaeologists think, right?