Dr. Selina Brace

We can't really tease it apart, but it seems more likely that it would have been a separate occasion that this wolf would have entered the cave.

So, yeah, we sort of like hinted at this a little bit earlier.

And this is actually the isotopic data that we use to look at the wolf.

And as William says, this is about, this tells us about diet.

We've used it a lot more in the past in sort of like archaeological studies to assess past human diets.

Because as we said, this is looking at those differences in carbon and nitrogen.

Nitrogen in particular tells us about tropic level.

So the position that an animal occupies in the food train.

So like a high level carnivore,

versus a mid-level omnivore versus a low-level herbivore.

This kind of analysis doesn't actually provide us with a menu card of their last supper or anything like that, but it does allow us to compare the values across different species.

In this case, we were able to look at the nitrogen values from both the human remains at the site

and the animal and the dog remains at the site.

And when we looked at this, we see that there are these dietary similarities across the dogs and the humans, and that they have a very similar diet and this similar degree of omnivory.

So obviously what we kind of like, what one draws from this is there's a possibility they were sharing the same diet as in the humans were potentially feeding the dogs the same things that they were eating, which is

really exciting I have to add because you know we're scientists and that's what we do there is a tiny caveat with this in that it isn't quite as clear cut as that being definitive because when we looked at that wolf you remember we had that wolf at the cave as well they also show a very similar value

Okay, well, obviously we don't know exactly what happened to this dog.

This dog died.

It is quite likely that this dog would have been used by the humans in life and in death.

So it's possible that this dog would have been eaten by the humans.