Apr 15, 2021 03:01 PM EDT
Archaeologists have found 6,000-year-old bones from a pet dog nearby the human remnants of its keeper at a burial site in Saudi Arabia. The remnants may be the earliest instance of dog domestication in the area, dating to about 1,000 years earlier than previous findings.
(Photo : Brett Sayles)
Royal Commission for AlUla (RCU)
The team of international researchers dug up the bones of the dog in 2018 after discovering the burial site in satellite imagery, as part of a large-scale archaeological survey by the Royal Commission for AlUla (RCU), which is a Saudi archaeology program with the dedication to preserve and develop historical sites in the Arabain Peninsula.
Since ancient hunter-gatherers couldn’t consume all the lean-meat protein they obtained, a sensible choice would have been to feed it to wolves, to keep them healthy while encouraging them to become more dependent on humans for sustenance. And as time passed, evolutionary forces would have worked their magic, gradually transforming tame wolves into even tamer domesticated dogs or so the Finnish researchers assert, in their imaginative yet science-based reconstruction of dog domestication history.
A Remarkably New Paradigm For Dog Domestication
This theory of how dogs became domesticated from wolves differs from current conventional wisdom, which relies on two competing hypotheses to explain dog domestication.