Humans were travelling with dogs 10,000 years ago, a new study finds

A photograph of a pack of dogs.

A new study has found that humans from around 10,000 years ago took dogs along with them on their travels across the world.

The study, published in the journal Science, found that dogs have been an integral part of human cultures for thousands of years.

Researchers from an international team led by Laurent Frantz, a paleogeneticist at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and Queen Mary University of London, looked at 73 ancient dog genomes. They included 17 newly sequenced samples from species in Siberia, East Asia, the Central Asian Steppe and China, according to the study.

“Important cultural changes occurred in these regions over the past 10,000 years, driven by the dispersal of hunter-gatherers, farmers, and pastoralists,” a press release regarding the study said.

The specimens came from archeological sites that were between 9,700 and 870 years old, it read.

Lachie Scarsbrook, a paleogeneticist and one of the study’s authors, told CTVNews.ca on Friday that the researchers looked at human genetic studies from Europe and Asia to identify major cultural and genetic shifts and then compared those to the dog genetics to see if they matched.

“Before people had any other domestic animal – no sheep, no cattle, no pigs – they had dogs,” Scarsbrook said. “They were so attached to them that they were taking them with them wherever they went.”

He added that the movement of eastern hunter-gatherers towards western Europe led to genetic changes. The research showed similar changes in dogs’ genes, which researchers took to be a clue to migration patterns.

At the same time, researchers noted changes in dogs’ genetics. Scarsbrook explained the dogs that used to be in a specific area looked “completely different,” and noted a mix of genetic variations heading east, following similar migration patterns to humans.

“Clearly, the people were bringing their dogs with them, because their ancestry couldn’t have appeared if the dogs weren’t moving with them.”

The study found that dogs had followed metal workers more than 4,000 years ago across the Eurasian Steppe, which stretches through Manchuria, Mongolia, Xinjiang, Kazakhstan, Siberia, European Russia, Ukraine, Moldova, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary and Slovakia.

Scarsbrook added that dogs found in the Arctic had the same genetics as dogs thousands of kilometres away in China.

“Before now, there’s been absolutely no dog genomes from ancient sites coming out of China,” he said. “This was groundbreaking in the sense that we finally had a peek into what the genetic diversity of ancient Chinese dogs was like.”

Dingoes, for example, look extremely different from any other known dog breed. That’s because they resemble dogs that were found in China nearly 5,000 years ago, Scarsbrook explained.

“Because of this movement of people and their dogs, they kind of turned over the ancestry,” he said.

According to Scarsbrook, this finding challenges the idea that Romans were the first people to domesticate dogs and keep them as pets.

“Dogs were being treated like people as early as 11,000 years and I think that’s probably the major discovery of this,” he said.