Study led by UA professor points to dog-human bonds forming earlier than previously thought

A University of Arizona anthropology professor spends summers in the state known as the Last Frontier excavating archaeological sites alongside researchers from the University of Alaska.

A new study by the group says bonds between early dogs and humans in the Americas started a couple thousand years earlier than what was previously known.

The group in recent years dug up part of a tibia from an adult canine that testing shows lived about 12,000 years ago, when moose and bison were the diet of wolves.

“And we thought looking at their diet, doing chemical analysis of their bones, was a good way to investigate the relationship they had with people at the time,” said François Lanoë, a UA assistant research professor and lead author of the study.

A review of the leg bone, and a roughly 8,100-year old jawbone found later at another archaeological site, revealed that both canines regularly ate salmon given to them by humans.

“It's really interesting from an evolutionary standpoint, if you want, or a historical point to when it happened and how it happened,” Lanoë said.

But, he also notes, this doesn’t rule out humans and canines starting to bond even further back.

“It almost certainly did before, 15, 16, 17,000 years (ago),” Lanoë said.