Fossil tooth hints dogs were domesticated 33,000 years ago

A 33,000-year-old fossil tooth recovered in southern Siberia belonged to one of the oldest known ancestors of the modern dog, according to a new study.
The researchers found that this fossil, named the 'Altai dog' after the mountains where it was recovered, is more closely related to modern dogs and prehistoric canids found on the American continents than it is to wolves.
The findings by Anna Druzhkova from the Institute of Molecular and Cellular Biology, Russian Federation, and colleagues from other institutions could indicate that dogs were domesticated around 33,000 years ago.
The point at which wolves went from wild to man's best friend is widely debated, though dogs were well-established in human societies by about 10,000 years ago.

Dogs and humans were buried together in Germany about 14,000 years ago, a strong hint of domestication, but genetic studies have pinpointed the origin of dog domestication in both China and the Middle East, LiveScience reported.
The new study evaluated the relationship of the Siberian fossil to modern dogs and wolves based on DNA sequence.

The researchers compared the genetic sequences from the Altai specimen with gene sequences from 72 modern dogs of 70 different breeds, 30 wolves, four coyotes and 35 prehistoric canid species from the Americas.
They found that the Altai canid is more closely related to modern domestic dogs than to modern wolves.

That means that the Altai canid was an ancient dog, not an ancient wolf � though it had likely diverged from the wolf line relatively recently, the researchers said.
If the Altai dog was really domesticated, it would push back the origin of today's house pets more than 15,000 years and move the earliest domestication out of the Middle East or East Asia, as previous studies have suggested.
However, the analysis was limited to only a portion of the genome, the researchers wrote.
"These results suggest a more ancient history of the dog outside the Middle East or East Asia, previously thought to be the centers where dogs originated," researchers said in a statement.

The study was published in the journal PLOS ONE.