Dr. William Marsh

The humans would have been tracking them, but so would have the gray wolves.

Same place, same time, no direct association, but almost certainly in competition to a degree with one another.

Yeah, that's almost certainly a possibility.

And I don't really want to muddy the waters here, but I am going to.

I'm going to bring in another site from the same study in which we've analyzed this Gough Cave dog.

Another site in Turkey.

So this is very, very similar age.

You have a dog here, a genetically identified dog.

You also have humans.

Now, the humans at this point were very different to the Maglanes at Gough's Cave.

They were eating fish.

They were eating cereals.

When we run the same analyses on these dogs at this Pinnabashi site, this Turkish site, we find that both humans and dogs have elevated nitrogen values indicating they were eating fish.

So whilst at Goff's Cave it's trickier to say that, at Pinnabashi, this other site, we found another very, very, very old dog

it is almost certainly that these dogs were being either directly or indirectly given fish to eat by the humans.

And these are not big fish.

These are small little sort of roaches, minnow type things, which you find all across the site.

So yeah, as Angela says, almost certainly a possibility of how they were being fed either directly or indirectly.

Yeah, I agree.

They probably were being used for hunting, or sentries, almost certainly, but they were not completely utilitarian.