Dr. William Marsh

There is a symbolic relationship here, which we get from the isotopes, but also there's other sort of

post-mortem relationship you see between the dogs at goff's cave and the humans at goff's cave as we as selena said earlier we have this post-mortem modification of human remains we also find that on the dog as well you guys are so great at teeing up what i was about to ask next so yes what happened to this dog

Definitely.

And we actually also see very similar treatments at this Turkish site I mentioned previously.

So the humans are completely different.

Rather than eating their dead, they do something which in our minds is probably far more sensible.

They bury their dead.

But alongside these human burials, you actually find dog burials as well.

So at Gough's Cave and at Pinnabashi, you've got two completely different human groups behaving very, very differently, but they appear to be treating their dogs in the same manner, same symbolic manner at each site, dependent on whichever culture they're with.

And alongside this as well, so once we'd done the DNA analysis of this individual from Gough's Cave and also at Pinnabashi, it's sort of, and I hate using one of my close collaborators' phrases here, but it was essentially the Rosetta Stone

It allowed us to look back at other samples for which we had very, very poor DNA preservation for and see, OK, now we have a dog from Goff's Cave.

Now we have a dog from Pinnabashi.

Is there anything that these data can tell us about other potential dogs in the region?

And the answer was, well, we've actually been able to identify three other dogs in central Europe.

And one of them in particular, from a site called Bonner Castle in Germany, was found, again, a sort of semi-skeleton, there's a mandible, there's a few long bones, but it was found alongside a burial of two individuals, dated around 15,000 years ago.

And it has on its mandible,

some pathologies which have seemingly been able to heal.

And the only way they would have been able to heal is through care.

And that care we interpret as being almost certainly given by humans.

So again, it's this close interaction between humans and dogs, which we see.