Dr. William Marsh

Because when an individual dies, the DNA begins to break down, gets very, very shorter, and gets more and more damaged.

So that's what we're having to deal with when we're talking about ancient DNA.

Because it's 15,000 years ago, that degradation has occurred for a very, very long period.

So, yes, we had to do a lot of very specialist lab methods to draw out these very, very small DNA fragments.

But once we had the DNA, once we had enough of the DNA, it's actually fairly straightforward to run the analyses.

Because gray wolves, which is the wild version of a dog, essentially, all dogs derive from a gray wolf population.

They are genetically very, very distinct from a dog population.

So once you have the DNA, you can run a very, very simple test, essentially comparing the DNA of our sample with a modern dog and a modern wolf.

And in our case, our sample was far more similar to the dog than it was to the grey wolf.

And at that point, that was the eureka moment.

Yeah, really cool.

One might think we were so, we're getting closer and closer to the time dogs were domesticated.

One might think at this point, dogs and wolves were genetically more similar, but not really.

We see the same distinction 15,000 years ago as we do today between dogs and wolves, which is quite remarkable.

Yeah.

It's hard to know what the dog would have looked like.

Probably very, very similar to a wolf.

But behaviorally, it probably would have been behaving in a very, very different manner to the wolf.

Captain Obvious over here.

You would have already seen this.