HUMAN EVOLUTION × EVOLUTION

The First Domestic Animal

~23,000 years ago (estimates 40,000 to 14,000)

Phanerozoic · Cenozoic · Quaternary · Pleistocene · Late Pleistocene

Wolves that tolerated people became dogs, thousands of years before any crop was sown or any other animal kept. Seventy-two ancient wolf genomes, spanning the last hundred thousand years, place the domestication in eastern Eurasia, and show that dogs in the Near East and Africa draw as much as half their ancestry from a second, western source. Dogs then travelled with people into the Americas.

Why it matters

The first domestication was not of a food source but of a hunting partner, and it happened while everybody was still hunting. It is also the only one whose raw material still exists: wolves are alive, so the before and the after can be compared directly, which is why the dog is the animal we understand best.

Dating & uncertaintyDisputed

Genomes of dogs and of 72 ancient wolves point to a domestication in eastern Eurasia, with a second ancestry in the Near East that is either a separate domestication or later mixing with local wolves. Dates from bones and from genomes have not converged: estimates run from 40,000 to 14,000 years ago.

Sources

1. Bergström et al. (2022), Nature · Grey wolf genomic history reveals a dual ancestry of dogs
2. Perri et al. (2021), PNAS · Dog domestication and the dual dispersal of people and dogs into the Americas
3. Frantz et al. (2016), Science · Genomic and archaeological evidence suggest a dual origin of domestic dogs

Earth history as one day

23:59:59.56438 ms before midnight

if Earth’s 4.54 billion years were compressed into a single day