Dr. Selina Brace

But we also find these very cool cranial vaults.

So this is where the skull caps have been very carefully removed and modified into what have been interpreted as like skull cups or sort of skull cups.

So these were found alongside the animal remains.

And of course, what we now know to be a dog.

Yeah, so there were wolves also around at this time point.

And as I said, we have lots of fragmentary canid remains at the Goscove site, even within this assemblage.

So we have looked at several of those to see if we could identify genetically more dogs from the site.

There is a tantalizingly so that there is another dog there, but the DNA isn't as well preserved.

But we can definitely say that one of the other canid remains that we looked at is, in fact, a wolf.

So, yes, morphologically, the less amount of material that you find, the harder it is to distinguish between the two just by looking at the bones.

Because, of course, you're just looking at the size.

And if you don't have a big enough fragment, you can't tell.

And that's where the DNA comes in.

Because I would say, you know, what is amazing is that, yes, there's all these millions of parts of the genome that look different in dogs and wolves.

And if you look at dogs and wolves today, they are different species.

So, yes, of course, you'd expect these millions of things.

But the fact that we see these in this dog from 15,000 years ago, it's amazing that that's still the case.

You know, it's brilliant.

Yeah.

Yeah, I completely agree.