{"id":18882,"date":"2024-12-24T14:22:01","date_gmt":"2024-12-24T15:22:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=18882"},"modified":"2024-12-24T16:26:40","modified_gmt":"2024-12-24T16:26:40","slug":"the-12000-year-old-wolves-that-ate-like-dogs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=18882","title":{"rendered":"The 12,000-Year-Old Wolves That Ate Like Dogs"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Animal remains unearthed in Alaska give clues to how wolves were domesticated.<\/p>\n

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As the Late Pleistocene ice age drew to a close, people and wolves began to bond<\/a>. From there, it was just a few millenniums to puppy yoga and dog influencers. But the details of exactly how and when wolves were tamed and domesticated remain up for intense debate<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s been millions of dollars spent to try to figure this out,\u201d said Robert Losey, an anthropologist at the University of Alberta who studies the domestication of dogs. Despite those efforts, he said, \u201cwe still have a really poor understanding of where and how dogs originated.\u201d<\/p>\n

A new study has added a crucial clue in the form of a 12,000-year-old leg bone from the Swan Point archaeological site<\/a> in Alaska. The DNA in those remains revealed that the animal\u2019s mother had been a wolf, but a chemical analysis showed the creature had a fish-heavy diet likely to have been provided by people, the researchers said.<\/p>\n

This discovery appears to capture a key moment in the budding relationship between wolves and people, offering compelling evidence of the two species drawing closer together. It\u2019s unclear, however, whether the newly discovered animal was intentionally fed by people, or had simply learned to scavenge their trash. That has left researchers divided on just where to place the Swan Point specimen on the wolf-dog continuum.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cIt may not be what we think of as domestication in the Western sense,\u201d said Joshua Reuther, an archaeologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and an author of the new study, published this month in Science Advances<\/a>. \u201cBut there is a very strong human-canid interaction there.\u201d<\/p>\n

The findings offer some of the earliest evidence of dog domestication in the Americas, older than the 10,000-year-old remains, also from Alaska, that were the subject of a 2021 study<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Animal remains unearthed in Alaska give clues to how wolves were domesticated.As the Late Pleistocene ice age drew to a close, people and wolves began to bond. From there, it was just a few millenniums to puppy yoga and dog influencers. But the details of exactly how and when wolves were tamed and domesticated remain up for intense debate.\u201cThere\u2019s been millions of dollars spent to try to figure this out,\u201d said Robert Losey, an anthropologist at the University of Alberta who studies the domestication of dogs. Despite those efforts, he said, \u201cwe still have a really poor understanding of where and how dogs originated.\u201dA new study has added a crucial clue in the form of a 12,000-year-old leg bone from the Swan Point archaeological site in Alaska. The DNA in those remains revealed that the animal\u2019s mother had been a wolf, but a chemical analysis showed the creature had a fish-heavy diet likely to have been provided by people, the researchers said.This discovery appears to capture a key moment in the budding relationship between wolves and people, offering compelling evidence of the two species drawing closer together. It\u2019s unclear, however, whether the newly discovered animal was intentionally fed by people, or had simply learned to scavenge their trash. That has left researchers divided on just where to place the Swan Point specimen on the wolf-dog continuum.\u201cIt may not be what we think of as domestication in the Western sense,\u201d said Joshua Reuther, an archaeologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and an author of the new study, published this month in Science Advances. \u201cBut there is a very strong human-canid interaction there.\u201dThe findings offer some of the earliest evidence of dog domestication in the Americas, older than the 10,000-year-old remains, also from Alaska, that were the subject of a 2021 study.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and\u00a0log into\u00a0your Times account, or\u00a0subscribe\u00a0for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?\u00a0Log in.Want all of The Times?\u00a0Subscribe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":18884,"comment_status":"close","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18882","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18882","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18882"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18882\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18885,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18882\/revisions\/18885"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/18884"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18882"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18882"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18882"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}