Chapter 1: What groundbreaking discovery was made about Britain's earliest dog?
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You might have seen very recently it's been announced that Britain's earliest known dog has been discovered some 15,000 years ago. It was living in Gough's Cave in Cheddar Gorge. Now I've got my own dog right next to me at the moment.
Chapter 2: How did climate changes influence human and dog migration in Ice Age Britain?
We've got Gummer. He's being a menace as always, this lovely Spaniel. And yes, Gummer, today we're talking about your 15,000 year old
ice age ancestor britain's first dog today we've got on the show two of the authors of that brand new paper we've got dr william marsh and dr selena brace and they're on to tell you all about this brand new discovery and the amazing world it's opening up and a world of ice age dogs in britain in western europe let's go good boy
The Ice Age, an age of megafauna, glacial landscapes, and our prehistoric hunter-gatherer ancestors. In Britain, 15,000 years ago, much of the landmass had been uninhabitable, covered in either ice or tundra wasteland. But things were changing, the climate was warming, and life was returning.
First came the herds of deer, horse and mammoth, crossing the great land bridge that at that time connected Britain with Europe. And then came humans, following the herds northwards. But these early groups, they didn't return on their own.
Chapter 3: What role did Gough's Cave play in the history of ancient dogs?
They also brought dogs. We now know this for sure thanks to brand new research on remains found at Gough's Cave in Somerset. Remains thought by researchers to belong to a wild wolf, but in fact belonged to a domesticated dog. So what has this research revealed about Britain's newest Ice Age pooch?
How close a relationship did it have with the humans that also occupied Gough's cave 15,000 years ago, both during its life and after its death? This is the breaking news story of Britain's first known dog and what we know so far. with researchers Dr. William Marsh and Dr. Selina Brace. Selina, William, it is great to have you both on the podcast. Welcome to the show.
Thanks for inviting us. It's lovely to be here. Yeah, thanks, Tristan. Thanks for having us.
You guys are more than welcome, especially for this. It feels like a breaking news story. The fact that Britain's oldest dog, or should we say earliest known dog, is some 15,000 years old. Selina, it's great.
I think that definitely constitutes as an exceptionally good work day when you realise that we've managed to sequence Britain's oldest dog, that's for sure.
And how much of a surprise was it to make this discovery?
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Chapter 4: What methods were used to identify the remains of the ancient dog?
Well, kind of yes and no. Yes, it's always a surprise. You know, we're working with ancient fragmented DNA, so we're always relieved when it works, when you get a result. But should we have been surprised? Well, we've been working on the site for a number of years, so we know that the DNA actually has very good preservation there.
And we've also known that it was quite likely that dogs existed there. So the clues were already there, but it took a little while for the genetics and the genetic capabilities to catch up. So, yeah, for everything to align as well as it did, yeah, that's always a good surprise.
I remember vividly the moment when I saw the initial DNA results. And I think it was an expletive-ridden response to seeing the fact that, yes, we had, first of all, very, very good DNA preservation from this specimen. But secondly, that it was a dog. Because there's been a sort of lot of academic focus on Gough's Cave, the site, over the last sort of 30, 40 years.
And this particular specimen was sampled back in the early 2000s for DNA analysis. But our methods were so unadvanced at that point, it just didn't work. And then in 2010, we had some other colleagues of a museum looked at it, looked at the morphology of it and found that it was very, very small compared to other wolves.
And Wade, in a very, very niche text, said, perhaps this is an example of a domestic dog. But the only true sort of empirical way to know this is through DNA analysis. And we did a DNA analysis in 2023, 2024. It's part of my PhD. And yeah, it's all come from there, really.
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Chapter 5: How do the dietary habits of ancient dogs compare to those of humans?
I also love this story because William and Selina, I've met you both before. We've done stuff on this site, Goff's Cave, that we're going to get into in a bit. But it's a lovely story how, Selina, I've done interviews with you in the past. You are such an expert in the DNA field, whether it's Cheddar Man, skeletons at Stonehenge and so on.
And William, of course, this is your PhD and you've got a background in it as well. To see you both working together on this project is lovely. So you guys are quite a team in making these discoveries.
Yeah, we've been really lucky to work together for a number of years now. So getting to work on Goss Caves for so long has been incredibly special.
Yeah, I first heard about Ancient DNA, the field, from a talk which Selena gave to me in 2019. And from there, we've been tied in a hip. You probably want to get rid of me now. No, never. No.
I also think in today's age, the fact that the first words out of your mouth was an expletive and not a eureka or a blimey or a golly, I think that emphasises once again just the significance of the discovery because I think you're quite right to have an expletive as the first word.
Maybe it tells you more about me as a person, perhaps.
So, Selina, we've mentioned it already now, Goff's Cave. So what is this location that, as you've already mentioned, people have known a lot about it for quite some time?
Yeah, so although we first saw the dog in the NHM collections, the dog was initially found in Gough's Cave in Cheddar Gorge in Somerset. So as I've said, we've worked on Cheddar Gorge for a number of years now.
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Chapter 6: What evidence suggests a close relationship between humans and dogs in prehistoric times?
It's an amazing site. It's a limestone cave that people can go and visit, go and see. It's got these amazing stalagmites. But it's also been, as you mentioned, an absolute treasure trove for significant archaeological finds over the years.
So the cave itself, or the particular assemblage, the group of bones and material that we're talking about now, where this dog has been found, dates to around the period of around 15,000 years. So this is a period of climate warming. So this is after the end of the last ice age, so when Britain would have been covered by ice sheets.
At this point, at 15,000 years, the ice sheets would have been retreating and plants and animals would have been recolonizing Britain and humans also returning at this time point and they would have been occupying this cave. Probably as kind of seasonal, it wasn't like they necessarily lived there. It was more like people were...
Going to the cave here is a seasonal thing, either perhaps to meet or for feasts. We don't know exactly, of course, but they were certainly occupying this cave at different periods during this time, 15,000 years ago.
Is this a time period then? After one of the coldest periods in Ice Age history, the last glacial maximum, a period when it's believed that humans left Britain altogether, but at some 15,000 years ago, so around that time, is evidence of small groups of humans coming back?
A site like Gough's Cave is one of the greatest cave sites in the area, maybe even in southern Britain, where people can live for small amounts of time?
Yeah, I would say so. So at around 20,000 years, which is when glaciation was at its peak, human and formal animal populations, plant populations couldn't inhabit these northern latitudes. So I think it's like the whole of Denmark from like north of maybe Birmingham was all covered in ice sheets. And for another 200, 300 miles south, we'd all been completely uninhabitable.
So human populations were restricted to these glacier refuges in two main glacier refuges in Europe at the time.
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Chapter 7: How does the discovery of Britain's first dog change our understanding of dog domestication?
One was sort of the Italy-Balkans region, and one was in southern France and northern Spain. And these individuals who we find at Gough's Cave are called the Magdalenian, and they stem from this refugia in southern France and northern Spain.
So essentially, as the ice sheets retreated, these groups of small hunter-gatherers, they are dependent on hunting terrestrial fauna, so wild horses, reindeer, things like that. Their prey essentially would have been moving northwards and they would have been tracking the prey northwards.
And we see an increase of these Magdalenian sites across northern Europe, across Germany, across Poland, between about 18,000 and 15,000. But the assemblage at Goff's Cave is one of the largest and one of the most rich in terms of not only human remains, but also artifacts and lithic technologies. And we have this incredible funerary behavior of funerary cannibalism.
So rather than burying their dead, as we might do, or cremate their dead, they were eating their dead.
All right. Don't reveal too much too quickly there, William. We're going to get to that, especially with the story. I've jumped ahead. No, you have not. You have teased what is to come with the story. But it's a fascinating example, isn't it, of humans coming back, of living in these caves, an amazing glimpse into life in Britain in the last few thousand years of the Ice Age.
So let's go to the dog remains. Selina, how much of the dog was discovered? How many remains do you have? Or did you guys have to learn to make this research?
Okay, so there is an awful lot of fragmentary bone material at this site.
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Chapter 8: What implications does this research have for future studies on ancient canids?
There's loads of animal bone and remains, and many of these can't actually even be morphologically identified. So we know that there's a lot of different canid remains. So these could be morphologically identified as belonging to the canid family, so either dog or wolf.
But the particular sample that we're talking about today, the one that we've done all this genetic work on, is actually a mandible. So this is the dog's lower jaw, and it was complete also with teeth. The dog mandible was found as part of this Paleolithic assemblage, so these human remains, but these animal remains and lithics or tools that we know come from this Paleolithic period.
They found this undisturbed sediment that had been protected by a fallen block near the cave entrance. It's within this material that this mandible was found and then been donated to the Natural History Museum. So it's a cave, it's a site and an assemblage that contains lots of different types of material, so human and animal.
And so you have the remains of this dog, you have the mandible, and you mentioned earlier how with advancements in technology that we're able to learn more about it and DNA and so on. So William, what methods did you guys have to garner as much information as possible from this mandible with teeth on it as well?
So we had sort of three main biomolecular methods is what we call them. So the first is obviously ancient DNA, which is what Selena and I specialize in. We also have perhaps the most important method, which is radiocarbon dating. So this is measuring the isotopic value of carbon-14 in the collagen. And essentially, once the individual is deposited,
The carbon-14 is an radioactive isotope, so it begins to degrade. So it has a half-life, I think it's of like 720 years or something like that. So essentially, you can track the proportion of carbon-14 to carbon-13, and that tells you the you can predict the age of an element.
And we did that for this mandible at Gough's Cave, and it came out as about 14,500 years old, which is very similar, or almost completely identical, let's say, to all the human remains, which had also been sampled for radiocarbon dating, and also some faunal remains.
So we have a very, very tight sort of age range from about 15.1,000 years ago to 14.2,000 years ago, where we know that these Magellanian groups were using Goskove. And alongside, the third method is called dietary isotope analysis. So this gives you an insight into what humans and dogs were eating based on their carbon and nitrogen values.
I must ask, because I saw these words in your paper and they just intrigued me. Selina, how do the words nuclear genome data fit into this?
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