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18000-year-old Frozen Puppy Discovered In Siberia

By Akinwale Akinyoade

02 December 2019   |   10:10 am

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Scientists  have made an amazing discovery when a well-preserved 18,000-year-old puppy's body was found near Yakutsk in eastern Siberia. Now named, Dogor, which is a local word for friend, DNA has not yet ascertained whether it is a dog or wolf. It is gathered that the puppy's body was found in permafrost and it's nose, teeth…

Dogor is 18,000 years old. Pic: Sergey Fedorov/Siberian Times

Scientists  have made an amazing discovery when a well-preserved 18,000-year-old puppy’s body was found near Yakutsk in eastern Siberia.

Now named, Dogor, which is a local word for friend, DNA has not yet ascertained whether it is a dog or wolf.

It is gathered that the puppy’s body was found in permafrost and it’s nose, teeth and fur are in remarkable condition.

It is “possibly the oldest dog ever found”, researcher Love Dalen said, adding that it was “amazingly well-preserved even before they cleaned it up”.

It feels like a “very recently dead animal”, he said.

Its nose and teeth are remarkably intact. Pic: Sergey Fedorov/Siberian Times

Speaking to CNN about the discovery, a researcher at the Centre for Palaeogenetics in Sweden, David Stanton said it was “normally relatively easy” to tell the difference between a dog and a wolf. He told CNN:

“We have a lot of data from it already, and with that amount of data, you’d expect to tell if it was one or the other.

“The fact that we can’t, might suggest that it’s from a population that was ancestral to both dogs and wolves.” 

The body’s age was measured by carbon dating its rib bone and it is suspected that Dogor is from a time when dogs became domesticated, leading Mr Stanton to suggest he may be “halfway between” dogs and wolves.

Dogor may date from the time when dogs became domesticated. Pic: Sergey Fedorov/Siberian Times

The body’s age confirms an earlier research published in the journal Nature Communications in 2017, which said dog domestication appeared to happen between 20,000 and 40,000 years ago.

The year before, an Oxford University study, published in the journal Science, said dogs had been domesticated twice, in Europe and Asia.