Britain's First Dog

in prehistoric island, or what made Alexander truly great.

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leading historians and archaeologists. You'll also unlock hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a brand new release every single week covering everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com/subscrib. Hello and welcome to a very special episode of The Ancients, where we're doing some

breaking news. 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 Goffs Cave in Cheddar, Gorge. Now, I've got my own dog right next to me at the moment.

We've got Gouma.

A menace is always this lovely spaniel, and yes Gouma, 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. With these early groups, they didn't return on their own. They also brought dogs. We now know this for sure, thanks to brand new research on Remains found at Goffs Cave in

Summerset, 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?”

Now closer relationship did it have, with the humans that also occupied Goffs 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. Selena Brace. Selena, 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 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 shall we say, earliest known dog, is some 15,000 years old, Selena, it's great. I think that definitely constitutes as an exceptionally good work day when you realise

that we've managed the sequence of Britain's oldest dog, that was for sure. And how much of a surprise was it to make this discovery?

Well, 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 and 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”

explosive 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 lot of academic focus on golf's cave site over the last 30, 40 years, and this particular specimen was sample 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, look at the morphology of it, and found that it was

perhaps this is an example of a domestic dog, but the only true sort of empirical weights

“of this, is through DNA analysis. And we did a DNA analysis in 2023, 2024, part of my PhD,”

and, yeah, it's all come from there, really. I also love this story, because William and Selena, I've made you both before, we've done stuff on this site to golf's cave that we're going to get into in a bit, but it's a lovely story, how Selena, I've done interviews with you in the past, you are such an expert in the DNA field, whether it's cheddar man, skeletons that don't hinge and so on, and

William, of course, you know, this is your PhD, and you've got background in it as well, to see you both working together on this project, is lovely. So you guys are quite a team and making these discoveries. Yeah, we've been really lucky to work together for a number of years now. So, getting to work on golf's caves for so long, has been incredibly special. Yeah, I first heard about X&DNA, a field from a talk, which Selena gave to me in 2019.

And from there, we've been tired of a hip.

I don't mean, I don't mean now, I always think, in today's age, the fact that the first

word sounds of your mouth wasn't exploitive and not a ureaker or a blind me or a gully.

“I think that emphasises once again just the significance of the discovery, because I think”

you're quite right to have an experience of the first word, but it tells me more about me as a person. So, Selena, we've mentioned it already now, "Golf'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, yeah. So, although we first saw the dog in the NHM collections, the dog was initially

found in "Golf's Cave" in Cheddar George in Somerset. So, as I've said, we've worked

on Cheddar George for a number of years now. 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, it's of all that 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 of 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, as 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. And this is a time period then. So, 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 and a site like Goph's Cave is one of the greatest cave sites in the

“area, maybe even in southern Britain where people can live for a small amounts of time?”

Yeah, I would say so. So, at around 20,000 years, which is when glaciation was added to peak, human and formal animal populations, plant populations, couldn't inhabit these northern latitudes. So, I think it's like the whole 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 restricts to these glacier refuges in two main glacier refuges in Europe

at the time, one was sort of Italy Balkans region and one was in southern France and northern Spain. And these individuals who we find at Goph's Cave are called the Magdalenean and they stem from this refuge here in southern France and northern Spain. So, essentially, as the ice sheets retreated, these groups of small hunter-gatherers depend on hunting, terrestrial fauna. So, wild horses, reindeer, things like that, bears bear prey essentially would have been moving northwards and they

would have been tracking the prey, northwards. And we see an increase of these Magdalenean sites across northern Europe, across Germany, across Poland, between about 18 and 15,000. But the one of the assemblage at Goph's Cave is one of the largest and one of the most rich in terms of not

behavior of funerary cannabism. So, rather than bearing bed dead, as we might do a crimate bed

“dead, they were eating bed dead. All right, don't don't reveal too much too quickly there, William.”

We're going to get to that, especially with the story. No, you have not, you have teased what is to come with the story. But it's a fascinating example, isn't it? A few men's 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. Selena, 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. 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 so-canded remains. So, these could be morphologically identified as belonging to the canot family.

“So, either dog or wolf. But the particular sample that we're talking about today, the one that we've”

done as all this genetic work on, is actually amandable. So, this is the dog's lower jaw and it was complete also with teeth. So, the dog mandible was found as part of this paleolithic assemblage. So, this human remains, but these animal reigned 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 and it's within this material that this mandible was found

and then been donated to the natural history museum. So, it's a cave that is 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 we've advancedments in technology that we're able to learn more about it and DNA and so on. So, 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 free main bi-malet clemeffords as what we call them. So, the first is obviously ancient DNA which is what's linear and I specialize in.

We also have perhaps the most important method which is radio carbon dating. So, this is looking,

this is measuring the isotopic value of carbon-14 in the collagen and essentially once the individual is deposited, the carbon-14 is and radio-active 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 age, you can predict the age of an element. And we did that for this mandible at Goph's Cave and it came out as about 14,500 years old which is very similar or more completely identical, let's say, to all the human remains which had also also been sample for radio carbon dating and also some formal 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 migrating groups were using Goph's Cave. And alongside of the

third method is called dietary isotope analysis. So, this gives you an insight into what,

demons 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. Selena, how do the words nuclear genome data fit into this? Okay, so nuclear genome data, this is basically the DNA. This is the DNA, not of the mitochondrial genome which is a very small genome, but the nuclear DNA is basically your DNA instruction manual. It's what tells the cells to make

either a person, a person, or in this case, a dog a dog. So, it gives you the, it gives all dogs the same characteristics that makes them dogs, but it's also what makes a great day different from a poodle and every spaniel, they're sort of slightly different from every other spaniel. If you know what I mean, it's the bits that make you the same and it's the bits that make you different. All encoded in our nuclear DNA. And so, it has to be go on to a bit more about the dog itself.

One last question on the context. You mentioned how obviously this dog man who was not found in isolation, these other remains human and formal dating to around 15,000 years ago in golf's cave. Just to summarize, so we have the best possible context, the best possible idea of how many different types of remains we have alongside the dog. Can you explain to us Selena,

so there are a lot of other bones at this site. So, we have both herbivores and carnivores. So,

“these include things like red deer, horse and orac, which is like a large extinct cattle.”

And these remains have often been butchered by humans. So, you see signs of cut marks in defleshing. There's also human artifacts at this site. So, we have things such as perforated batons, which are these like deer antlers. We're like holes in them and you have needles. You have napping tools. So, these are the things that people use to like shape stone. And of course, we have a really cool engraved human arm bone. This engraved is beautifully artistically engraved.

There's zigzag pattern very, very cool. But, of course, we also have these these human remains

at the site as well. And the human remains are highly fragmented. We have over 200 small fragments

of people, but perhaps what's most exciting about almost interesting about these people is that most of them have signs of post-mortem human modification. So, these are, this is our way of saying, it looks like these people were cannibalised. Okay? So, for the faint heartage amongst us, you know, bloggeries now, but we do see that they have cut marks, they have human teeth marks, two marks scraping marks. So, yeah, very clearly these are the means of people who have been

into by other people. But we also find these very cool cranial vaults. So, this is where the skull caps have been very carefully removed and modified into what have been interpreted as like

skull caps or the skull caps. So, these were found alongside the animal remains and, of course,

what we now know to be a dog. And we see examples, although it goes cave as exception and how large it is in terms of the amount of material, which we have, lithics, form of remains, human remains, you actually see other examples of these cannibalistic behaviours across from a Galenian,

“across Europe. So, I think there's 13 sites where you see this cannibalism, six whip,”

which have skull caps. So, it shows that Govskave was, obviously, unique sight in itself, but also linked to the sort of wider population across content Europe at the time. And just to clarify there, because you mentioned Italy as well, William. So, when we say lithic, do we mean kind of stone to the stones? Yes, stone to the stones. Yes, stone to the stones. Yes, stone to the stones. Yeah, stone to the stones. And these stone to the technologies would be sort of,

although unique is probably not the right word, but, in the ocean critic of the Magdaleneians. So, Magdaleneians would have their own sort of type of lithic or stone to the technologies compared to other hand-to-gavre groups, other hand-to-gavre cultures, or the same later. So, let's get onto the dog itself. William, when you were doing this research alongside Selena, how did you find out that this mandible belonged to a dog and not a wolf,

because surely that it's quite difficult to distinguish between the two and the bones when there remains a some 15,000 years old? Yeah, it was pretty tricky to be honest. And what we had to do is essentially drill a hole in the bone, get some bone powder, extract the DNA from his bone powder, and then sequences from very, very large and expensive DNA sequencing machines. The thing about ancient DNA is that it's very, very fragmented.

So, if I was to take a drop of your bloodtristan now, it would have more DNA in it than probably 500 samples at the Natural History Museum. And not only would that do, you would have more of it, more of your own DNA, but also it would be very, very long compared to the ancient DNA in these samples. Because as one individual dies, the DNA begins to break down, gets very, very shorter,

“and it gets more and more damaged. So, that's what we're having to deal with when we're talking”

about ancient DNA. Because it's 15,000 years ago, that degradation is occurred from a very, very long period. So, yes, we had to do a lot of very specialist lab methods, draw out these very, very small DNA fragments. But once we had the DNA, once we had enough of the DNA, it's actually fairly straightforward to run the analyses. It's gray wolves, which is a wild version of a dog, essentially. All dogs derive from a gray wolf population. They are genetically very,

very distinct from a dog population. The once you have the DNA, you can run a very, very simple test, essentially comparing with DNA of our sample with a modern dog and a modern wolf. And in our case,

it was for, that was for your e-commerce. Selena, am I correct that? I mean, do we know much about

“wolves, 15,000 years ago as well? Am I correct that there is also a wolf? Discovered in Goth's cave”

alongside the dog? Yeah, so there were wolves also around at this time point. And as I said, that we have lots of fragmentary canedge remains at the Goth's cave site, even within this assemblage. So we have looked at several of those to see if we could identify genetically more more dogs from the site. There is a tantalizing, tantalizingly so that there is another dog there, but the DNA isn't as well preserved, but we can definitely say that one of the other can

remains that we looked at is in fact a wolf. So, yeah, so morphologically, the less them out material that you find, the harder it is to distinguish between the two just by looking at the bones, because of course you're just looking at the size and if you don't have a big enough fragment,

you can't tell. And that's where the DNA comes in, because I've been so, you know, what is amazing

“is that, yes, there's all these millions of parts of the genome that look different in dogs and”

wolves. And if you look at dogs and wolves today, they are different species. So, yes, of course, you'd expect these millions of things. But the fact that we see these in this dog for 15,000 years ago, it's amazing that that's still the case, you know, it's brilliant. Yeah, really cool. One might think we were so, we're getting close and close to a time, dogs were domesticated. One might think at this point, dogs and wolves were genetically more similar, but not really.

We see the same distinction 15,000 years ago as we do today, between dogs and wolves, which is

quite remarkable. Yeah, that I completely agree. It's just, it's quite, it's just amazing that they are

actually already that different. So, you know, to put it into another context what it means is these paleolithic dogs are already more similar to modern dogs, you know, five day at home, then they are to these ancient wolves from the same time. That kind of like blew my mind to be honest. Yeah, it's crazy. I mean, this was what I was wanting us to get to wolves. It was the fact that if you got a wolf evidence of a wolf at Goth's cave, at the same time that you got evidence of a dog

in these humans populations, to try and get them in our mind how similar this Ice Age dog, and that Ice Age wolf would have been, how distinguishable they would have been to these human people who's at that time, but from what you guys are saying, actually, yes, there would have been clear differences between the two. Yeah, but it's hard to know what the dog would have looked like, probably very, very similar to wolf, but behaviorally, it probably would have been behaving a very,

different amount to the wolf. I hope it was behaving differently, William. Well, I say, might have had a different problem. And perhaps, obviously, you would have already seen this, yeah, genetically divergence, not much breeding between grey wolf and dog populations, but perhaps for greatest barrier to gene flow, the vices breeding between the two species would have been the dogs association with these humans, essentially such a strong barrier, if a dog was to make

with a grey wolf, it's highly likely that hybrid individual would have been probably too aggressive to be associated with the humans at the time, but B also not be accepted within the grey wolf populations, within the grey wolf pack, so would have almost certainly not have reproduced. And it's that really strong barrier to genetic drift, which probably what initially caused that divergence between wolves and dogs. But going back to something, which Selena says, a little bit more of topic here,

there's been so many claims of dogs in the Paleolithic, usually based on morphology.

“So, but I think that one of our earliest claims was 36,000 years ago from a site in Goya Cave,”

so this is a site in Belgium. And these researchers were completely convinced that this candidate was a dog based on morphology, based on its deficit environment. But our collaborator over Oxford did the DNA on it. It turns out it's just an extinct population of grey wolves, it's very wolfy. And there are 10 or 12 examples of more recent, so 36, 32, 30,000, 28,000 of these dogs, which when you do the DNA, they just come out with the wolves, they are essentially wolves.

So, actually finding a dog this old has been tried many, many times before, and we were very

fortunate to be the first people to actually have cracked it. So, let's go into theory here now,

because I think this is probably something that we can't figure out even from the surviving evidence. But could we assume then the dog with the people at Gauves Cave was obviously a dog that lived with the people, you know, wasn't too aggressive with them, was part of almost, we could think

time period, just what we know from, you know, behaviorally and DNA. And the fact that it's a wolf,

was this clearly, you know, this was a wild animal, this could have been hunted by the human population, or it could have just been living at the cave at a different time. It wouldn't have

“been part of that small human group, Selena. Yeah, that's correct. I think that's the assumption”

that we would make from this. I mean, you did not see signs of modification of the wolf. So, the wolf, sorry, has not been nurtured. The wolf, we see no signs of any kind of modification in that way. And also, as we said, this is that the people at Gauves Cave were likely occupying the cave seasonly. They weren't there all the time. So, it's more likely perhaps that this wolf was coming in,

even a completely different time point to the humans. We can't say for sure, obviously, you know,

our radio carbon dating isn't that good to put it down to very precise dates. But, you know, one could imagine that this cave was being used by, you know, wild animals as people were animals were scavenging in there, as well as humans using it as a bit to recite. So, we can't really tease it apart, but it seems more likely that it would have been a separate occasion that this wolf would have entered the cave. But what's interesting here is that the gray wolves

would have been hunting. The same thing as the humans would have been hunting. So, they would have been tracking the reindeer as they seasonly migrated around. The humans are in track of them,

but so would have a gray wolf. Same place, same time, no direct association, but almost certainly

in competition to the degree of what we've won another. We've already talked about from the data that you've gathered from this dog mandible, how it's revealed the age of the dog, the closeness to modern day dogs, compared to wolves. But Selena, what other information about this dog

“have you been able to gather? Have you been able to ascertain from the surviving mandible?”

So, yeah, we sort of like hinted at this a little bit earlier, and this, this is actually the isotopic data that we use to look at the wolf. And as Williams says, this is about this tells us about diet. We used it a lot more on the past, in sort of like archaeological studies to assess past human diets. Because as we said, this is looking at those differences in carbon and nitrogen, nitrogen in particular tells us about tropic level. So, the position that an animal occupies

in the food train. So, like a high level carnival versus a mid level, on level versus a low level, sort of hair before. So, yeah, yeah, this kind of analysis doesn't actually provide us like with a menu card or like the last supper or anything like that, but it does allow us to compare the values across different species. And in this case, we were able to look at the nitrogen values from both the human remains at the site and the animal and the dog remains at the site. And when we looked at this,

we see that there are these dietary similarities across the dogs and the humans, and that they have a very similar diet and this similar degree of omnivory. So, obviously, what we kind of like, what one draws from this is as a possibility, they were sharing the same diet, as in the humans were potentially feeding the dogs, the same things that they were eating, which is really exciting.

“I have to read because, you know, we're a scientist and that's what we do. There was a tiny caveat”

with this in that it isn't quite as clear a cart as that, the definitive because when we looked at that war for you, remember we had that war for the cave as well. They also show a very similar value. So, it's not quite as clear as they were exactly, you know, just exclusively showing the dinner, but it does still very much point to shared lives and this closeness and a close bond between them as well. Well, you might remember doing an interview with Dr. Angela Perry a couple

of years ago on the earliest talks and the importance of leftovers in the story of Dr. Domestication and we'll put a link in the description to our chat with Angela. Dr. Domestician Perry as well about that, where she explores more about that, but we'll get Dr. Domestication in a bit, but could we imagine a scenario where these people in Goste Cave as a leaner says it's not completely clear, but, you know, they were having their dinner and then

what they didn't eat, the leftovers were given to the dog in their community, were given to the dog in Goste Cave at that time. Yeah, yeah, that's almost certainly a possibility. And I don't really want to mud even water here, but I am going to. I'm going to bring in another site from the same study which we've been in which we've analysed his Goste Cave dog, another site in Turkey.

Now the humans at this point were very different to a miglains at Goste Cave,

“they were eating fish, they were eating cereals. When we'd run the same analyses on these dogs”

at this Pinobashi site with Turkish site, we find that both humans and dogs have elevated nitrogen values indicating they were eating fish. So whilst Goste Cave is trickier to save that at Pinobashi, with other site we've found another very, very old dog. It is almost certainly that these dogs were being either directly or indirectly given fish to eat by the humans. And these are not big fish, but these are small, it all sort of roaches, mono type things,

which you find all across the site. So yeah, Adagela says, almost certainly a possibility of

how this, of how way we're being fed, I would directly render it. But that is amazing. That's one

of the things that makes us research. No doubt why it's so popular when you guys announced it to the world. This relatable nature of it, the fact that we're going back to the eye sage, we're talking

“about dogs, we're talking about a community feeding their dog as well and it's not just this idea”

of an ancient prehistoric dog being used for a practical purpose for hunting to benefit the community, the fact that we're getting insights into that kind of close bonded nature. That's so many of us still have with dogs today. Yeah, I agree. They probably won't be used for hunting or centuries, almost certainly, but they were not completely authoritarian. There is a symbolic

relationship here, which we get from the eye stoves, but also it's other sort of

post-mortem relationship you see between the dogs at Gophs Cave and the humans at Gophs Cave. As we as Selena said earlier, we have this post-mortem modification of human remains. We also find that on the dog as well. You guys are so great at teeing up. Well, it's about to ask an next. So yes, what happened to this dog? Okay, well obviously we don't know exactly what I have to stop this dog died. It is quite likely that this dog would have been used by the humans

in life and in death. So it's possible that this dog would have been eaten by the humans. It

“would have been had a nutritional function for them. This is the Paleolithic after all. You have to”

make use of the resources that you have, but there is more. It isn't just basic nutritional requirement associated with this dog, because we also see these post-mortem modifications. There's aspects of this mandible that were treated after the animal had died by the humans woman to assume that they're human companions. And this is that they actually make a hole in the mandible. And this is important. Why waste time energy doing this if this animal to you did not

have some significance. They make a perforation in it. For what? We don't know for sure. One can imagine lots of different ways they may have used that or why. But the fact is that they actually do something with these remains more akin to a ritual modification rather than it being a basic nutritional requirement for food. And that is I think what sets apart this bone and the dog to the other animal remains at the site. Definitely. And we actually also see very similar

treatments at this Turkish site I mentioned previously. So the humans are completely different, rather than eating their dead, they do something which in our minds is probably far more sensible. They bury their dead. But alongside these human burials, you actually find dog burials as well. So at Goste Cave and at Pinnobashi, you got completely different human groups behaving very, very differently. But they appear to be treating their dogs in the same manner,

same symbolic manner at each site, dependent on whichever culture they're with. And alongside this as well. So once we've done the DNA analysis of this individual from Goste Cave and also Pinnobashi, it's sort of and I hate using one of my close collaborators' phrases here. But it was essentially the Resetter stone. It allowed us to look back at other samples for which we had very, very poor DNA preservation for and see, okay, now we have a dog from Goste Cave. Now we have a dog

from Pinnobashi. Is there anything that these data can tell us about other potential dogs in the region? And the answer was, well, we've actually been able to identify free other dogs in central Europe. And one of them in particular, from a cycle Bonnebacastlan Germany, was found, again, a sort of semi skeleton as a mandible, there's a few long bones, but it was found as a long side, a barrel of two individuals, they just around 15,

thousand years ago. And it has on its mandible some pathologies which have seemingly been able to heal. And the only way they would have been able to heal is through care. And that care,

between humans and humans and dogs, which we see Goste Cave has essentially unlocked loads of

“other insights which we can have about the dog-human relationship. Because before this research,”

what was the earliest known concrete evidence for dogs in Western Eurasia? Did it actually span as far back as the Paleolithic as the Ice Age? So it's very, this is very tricky. As I said earlier, there's been loads of claims. But earliest genetic evidence we have for dogs anywhere before this study was 11,000 years ago. And this was in Northern Europe, Sweden, Russia, actually more sort of Western Russia. This dog at Bonne-Bakassel, although we have very,

very poor DNA preservation in it, because of its association with its human burial, because of

these pathologies, it was widely seen as the earliest dog. Or, genetically, we had no understanding

of them. We didn't know whether it was a dog or wolf. Miss analysis has allowed us to confirm, yes, it is indeed a dog. And we found all the one. Going back to the evidence of post-mortem modification on the mandible that survives. So in that I guess that very much aligns with what you mentioned earlier about the human remains. There was that one which has the zig-zag on it as well. So there is some clearly on this mandible,

dare I use the word art or something like that. Some, you know, creations on the bone after death, that leave a lasting mark on the remains of this dog. Yeah, so with the human remains on the

“on the arm bone where we have the zig-zag, I think, you know, that you can see as being artistic,”

you know, that's I think both are creative, but you know, the arm bone one can be seen as being

artistic and the on the dog bone is definitely modified for a purpose. It's modified, it's creative, it's showing that there is this connection even after death and that it has more purpose to it. So yeah, I think to me, to me, anyway, it attests that that strong bond between human and dog. But and it also makes you think, why did they do it? Why did they make this whole in the mandible? Could have fled, had been strong through it and would it was it being used as something?

I don't know. My brain doesn't allow me to think that way. There's some anthropologists and archeologists out there who will almost certainly have better insights than I have. But is there's no

“reason to have really done it? Must have been symbolic. Yeah. I mean, well, yes, it's in not too far”

fetch to say necklace. Could this have been a very morbid necklace? I really want it to be a necklace. I really want it to be an necklace. Selena, this is such a cool discovery and it sounds like there will be more information coming to light around it in the future. What has this new discovery at Goffs Cave? What would you say it's revealed? What new evidence? What new information has it revealed? About people coming back to Britain at the end of the ice age, some 15,000

years ago? What new information has it revealed? Yeah, so it's not just revealing information about the dogs, but it's also revealing about people as well. I mean, yes, so it pushes back this earliest genetic evidence for domesticated dog by more than 5,000 years, as we mentioned. But it is really intriguing. There's aspect of these different people, these different cultures who had dogs. So Williams mentioned that we have these different groups. We have these Magdaleneian people,

these Magdaleneian culture that Goffs Cave, and then we have the Epigraphettiian culture, a different group of people at Pinobashi Cave in Turkey. We have these different groups. We have these culturally different people, the Magdaleneian at Goffs Cave, and then we have the Anatolian hunter gatherers at the Pinobashi Cave in Turkey. So these two culturally different groups are culturally different. They have different burial practices. They have some different diets.

We've said that we have the fish diet evidence that the cave, whereas we have a more formal diet evidence from Goffs Cave, but they're also genetically distinct. That these people actually genetically look different, and both and culturally look different. And yet, they both have dogs. And then when we look at the genetics of these dogs, these dogs are actually pretty similar, genetically to each other. So what this would seem to show is that even though these people aren't

exchanging, they're not interbreeding, they're not exchanging cultural goods and ideas,

between the dogs. It's kind of tantalizing to think that these dogs are the thing that starts to

“unite people. I mean, again, that's me like kind of imagining things and thinking of this in a”

God of a future way. But you know, it is true for absolute is that these groups are very culturally different, genetically different, but the dogs are very similar. So something is happening here where they are exchanging the dogs. All these dogs are actually moving between them. There is a close ness there, and this could be the thing that is binding them, which is fascinating thought. It is remarkable that these two sites, three and a half thousand kilometres apart,

two and a half thousand miles, have humans, there's no evidence of any interaction between humans. They could play different, given area, human genetically, but they have exactly the same dogs. And we were looking at how to actually, that was a big question for about a month,

how enough did they get there. And are what we're thinking now is that this sort of third culture

of the Epicuregotian, who we find in a Balkan region, an Italian region, they begin to spread northwards after the Magellanians have spread. You see evidence of dogs with this group, this Epicuregotian group, at sites in Italy, Switzerland and Germany. You actually see the Epicuregotian coming into the UK at about 14,000 years ago, 14, 14,000 years ago. So the of the Goscabe is really the example of the last, Mike Lainian assemblage in the UK.

And then after that, the Epicuregotian and Stree and Lific culture. And the culture spreads across the UK. And it was this expansion, which starts around 16,000 years ago, which we believe perhaps spread these dogs across a region. Because although at Goscabe, we don't see any evidence of the Epicuregotian at Pidobarsha in the Anatolian hunter-gatherers. They show evidence of gene flow between the humans. So there is evidence of connectivity in culture and the Anton hunter

hunter-gatherer culture. Goscabe is a little bit more complicated, but the fact that we have Epicuregotians 800 years later in the UK makes me think that the dogs were being spread by these Epicuregotians. And that somehow these Mike Lainians got these dogs. And how they did that, again, that's one of three anthropologists, but we almost certainly think that. We're about so current best working on the opposite. It's so interesting, isn't it? I mean, as a Joe Blogg's

listening into you guys, does it, do we get a sense then that more than 15,000 years ago that and already domesticated line of dogs were coming west into Western Eurasia? And then kind of

spreading far and wide. So ultimately you get certain domestic dogs in that site in Turkey,

but ultimately you also 15,000 years ago you get similar, a similar type of domestic dog in the UK as well. Is that the information we can start to glean with you? Yeah, that is

“exactly the sort of information we can start to glean. And I think what is interesting is a”

fact that these cultures, or most certainly didn't have dogs beforehand. But they've obviously seen a utility of these dogs. And then they've incorporated them into their cultural behavior. Whereas in sort of later periods the mesolithic, the neolithic, when a dog moves, or when a human moves, a dog's, a dog moves. Yeah, so you could, it's actually quite easy to track population movements of humans via dog genomes. They're both sort of quite well correlated. If you see a dog with

this ancestry pattern, you're going to see a human of this ancestry pattern. Whereas in the paleolithic, we don't see that. We see the same dogs across completely different human groups. And it's how that radiation happened, we think it's very frequently. We're still a sort of pretty uncertain about it to be honest. But it appears that dogs have spread due to their utility. Most certainly due to their utility, which is fascinating. Do you think there is likely

heard that further ice age can it remains? That may have already been discovered from Goffes cable elsewhere. We'll prove with the new technology. We'll prove to also be a domestic dog.

“Do you think we'll have further examples of dogs from Ice Age Britain coming to light in the future?”

Yes, I do believe so. Oh, I hope so, anyway. I agree. That's very exciting. Do you think it will be just be from Goffes Cave? Or could you see us? Are there other very good late Ice Age Britain sites coming to light now? We've got humans, we got animal remains. That might also reveal more information. There are. This is this. We are working on this. Let's just say we are working on this. And not just for UK as well. We're looking

more to come to us than more to come. You'll be right in this back again. We hope. Yeah. Let's hope. Let's hope. Okay. We need what you were saying about dogs coming into Western Eurasia on the east. Does this very much align with this idea? I know it must be still murky waters that when dogs are domesticated from wolves. It doesn't happen in what we now

It's tricky. It's tricky. So I think maybe I misspoke but I was thinking more of an epigenetics in a Balkan Italy region had the dogs had these dogs post Ice Age and then spread rather than being from a Near East. But in terms of how where and when dogs themselves became domesticated,

we fall when I first had the epiphany that we got a dog here. I really did think we'd be able

to answer the question of where were these dogs domesticated. It hasn't really told us anything like that. Our whole paper has gone a completely different way compared to what it could have been,

“which is origins of dog domestication. And I think the best way to answer this question is just by”

heavily sampling more candidates from a pre-LGM period, which is almost certainly when dogs became domesticated, to try to pinpoint the sort of link between the grey wolf population, which became domesticated and the dog population which we have domesticated. And very loads of sort of theories about how this might have occurred. You've got the LGM, so you've got the ice sheets on the northern latitudes, very likely human populations, for human populations, did my great south

words, grey wolf populations would have migrated southwards into these refugier, grey wolf population in very, very close interact with the human population. That is probably the process of of how dogs and all how dogs became out of walls with that interaction between initially wild walls and humans, and very, very strong selective pressures, which would have been

“experienced by a wolf population, which then sort of leasing become dogs. But we don't know where it happened.”

Definitely a razor, but West East don't know. There's loads of theories and I just add to that that just saying, if we think about the fact that we see that dogs and wolves already so genetically distinct by 15,000 years and they are so widespread across Europe, as we've said, we've found these dogs now all across Europe, their widespread, they're very different, so clearly the actual domestication process must have happened quite a while before then. That's just what

I would add to that. You can predict the divergence of a population of a genetic data from modern genetic data and come very strongly predicted between 40 and 20,000 years ago, which isn't that precise to be honest. Many studies have come out saying it must have been 100,000 years ago. 80,000 years ago. But now with the latest data, it's between 40 and 20. We're still as a particularly precise, but in terms of the archaeology and the sort of climate of the rate of the time,

that is when the climate was beginning to worsen, glacial maximum type things, and then you're beginning to see populations behaving in perhaps different manner. It's actually a very informative

“time point here. It probably is a time point where not only was probably the most important”

the dog domestication, but also human cultural evolution, it's probably the most important time

period for that free neolithic. So Lena, this is a really exciting time and it sounds like there's more exciting information that will be coming to light around Britain's oldest dog, around dogs in Ice Age Britain and Europe in the future. Good luck with all the research, hope to get you back on the show when that information comes to light. And it just goes to me to say, thank you so much to you both for coming on the show. Tristan, always a pleasure to be here.

Thank you so much for having us. Yes, an absolute pleasure and we will be seeing you again, no doubt. Well, there you go. There was Dr William Marsh and Dr Selena Grace talking through this brand new research, the exciting new discovery that Britain's first known dog goes back to the Ice Age, some 15,000 years old. Really exciting time for those studying Ice Age remains and early human remains with the new developments in science. That means that more and more discoveries

are going to be revealed in the years ahead. We know how much you love it when we explore the deep past the Ice Age human evolution and so on. So don't worry, we're doing more episodes similar to this in the future. I hope you enjoyed it. Thank you so much for listening. Now, if you enjoy the ancients, please make sure to follow the show on Spotify or wherever you get to your podcasts. That really helps us and you'll be doing a big favor. If you'd also be

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