Dr. Selina Brace

At this point, at 15,000 years, the ice sheets would have been retreating and plants and animals would have been recolonizing Britain and humans also returning at this time point and they would have been occupying this cave.

Probably as kind of seasonal, it wasn't like they necessarily lived there.

It was more like people were...

Going to the cave here is a seasonal thing, either perhaps to meet or for feasts.

We don't know exactly, of course, but they were certainly occupying this cave at different periods during this time, 15,000 years ago.

Okay, so there is an awful lot of fragmentary bone material at this site.

There's loads of animal bone and remains, and many of these can't actually even be morphologically identified.

So we know that there's a lot of different canid remains.

So these could be morphologically identified as belonging to the canid family, so either dog or wolf.

But the particular sample that we're talking about today, the one that we've done all this genetic work on, is actually a mandible.

So this is the dog's lower jaw, and it was complete also with teeth.

The dog mandible was found as part of this Paleolithic assemblage, so these human remains, but these animal remains and lithics or tools that we know come from this Paleolithic period.

They found this undisturbed sediment that had been protected by a fallen block near the cave entrance.

It's within this material that this mandible was found and then been donated to the Natural History Museum.

So it's a cave, it's a site and an assemblage that contains lots of different types of material, so human and animal.

Okay, so nuclear genome data, this is basically the DNA.

This is the DNA not of the mitochondrial genome, which is a very small genome, but the nuclear DNA is basically your DNA instruction manual.

It's what tells the cells to make either a person a person, or in this case, a dog a dog.

So it gives all dogs the same characteristics that makes them dogs, but it's also what makes a Great Dane different from a poodle and every Spaniel slightly different from every other Spaniel, if you know what I mean.

It's the bits that make you the same and it's the bits that make you different, all encoded in our nuclear DNA.