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Dogs widely distributed across western Eurasia at least 14,300 years ago – ABC News & Headlines – Australian Broadcasting Corporation
Oct
Program:The Science Show
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The bones were found in 2013 by a team in Türkiye. They look like granules of instant coffee. 40 bones were recovered, with analysis applied to 10, producing one success. This is the genetic lottery with the result being genome sequences of two dogs dating back 14,000–16,000 years, the earliest dogs to be sequenced. Dogs at that time were already genetically distinct from wolves. The work shows that dogs were widely distributed across western Eurasia long before the introduction of agriculture with evidence that the genetic diversification of dogs started much earlier than previously thought.
Guest
Lachie Scarsbrook
Postdoctoral Researcher in Ancient DNA
University of Oxford
Oxford UK
Presenter
Robyn Williams
Robyn Williams: I’ve been in Oxford meeting younger scientists from the south, and in this next instance, from New Zealand. Lachie Scarsbrook, formerly at the renowned University of Otago at Dunedin, has scored a prime Nature paper about the first dog, research also done, by the way, at the Crick Institute, and here he is.
Lachie Scarsbrook: It's been great. Yeah, I've really enjoyed being a part of the Oxford community and just the kind of research you get to be a part of, going from the stuff at Otago, which I was involved in, was very New Zealand-focused, a lot of local conservation, extinction, this kind of thing, whereas you move over here and it's all global, big picture questions, it's things that the whole world is interested in, not just one country, one island.
Robyn Williams: And how come, after so much argument about the origin of dogs discussed again and again, you were put on track somehow to the answer you got? What was the trail?
Lachie Scarsbrook: A long trail, like you alluded to, yeah. I think the hardest thing about working on domestic dogs, compared to other animals like sheep, goats, pigs, there wasn't a lot of them at the start. If you're farming sheep, you know, you're keeping a lot of them, you're eating them, you're dumping them. So people like archaeologists and geneticists, like I am, can go back in time, sample these populations and really get a feel for the processes that were happening 10,000, 15,000 years ago. But for dogs, it's completely different. We're thinking these mobile bands of hunter-gatherers, they're moving across the landscape, they're not staying in one place for a very long time, and keeping a dog alive is going to be expensive. And when it's already very hard to live, you've got a low number of dogs living with people that are moving all over the landscape, the chances of preserving these bones is super low.
Robyn Williams: And they interbreed!
Lachie Scarsbrook: And they interbreed, these dogs and wolves, exactly. But the super interesting thing is that what we found with the samples, these early dogs from 15,000, 16,000 years ago, is that they were already completely distinct from wolves. There's this chasm that exists genomically between these two populations, despite there being actually wolves recovered from the same places where these dogs were recovered from. So clearly there's something in the hunter-gatherer mindset that keeping these populations distinct from one another, because like you said, they can freely interbreed. We have modern-day breeds that are mixes of wolves and German shepherds, the Saarloos wolf dog, for example. I don't know why you'd want one of those, they're just going to tear your house apart, or eat your child!
Robyn Williams: Indeed, so where actually did you go, and how did you know where to start looking?
Lachie Scarsbrook: I'm very fortunate in the fact that my hands don't get very dirty. I spend a lot of time in the lab, or just spending my time on the computer writing code to, I guess, answer some of these questions using the genetic code. So we were working with a team in Türkiye that did some excavations back in 2013. So they'd had these bones for a long time, they'd sent them to us back when they excavated them, but the technology wasn't really there to get the answers we needed at the time. So now we went back with the new techniques, re-examined these bones, and that's when the big discovery came, applying new techniques to these old bones.
Robyn Williams: And the old bones had enough there for you to look at, even genetics?
Lachie Scarsbrook: Very remarkably. So you look at these bones and they look like instant coffee granules, there's nothing particularly special about these things, and especially they don't look like they're going to preserve any usable DNA. When we go targeting DNA samples, we look for the skull, there's this really dense portion where your inner ear, the thing that's responsible for your mobility, where that's housed, that's really good for DNA preservation because the bone forms when you're born and doesn't remodel during life. And that dense, strong bone is where the best DNA is preserved. But these remains were fragmentary puppies, so their bones hadn't fully formed yet, they were also these small post-cranial bones, so things like vertebrae and limb bones, which are incredibly porous, and that enables all the things like these bacterial contamination, human contamination, to seep into these bones. So we were not expecting these to work whatsoever. So when one, it was actually out of all of the about 40 bones we've recovered and we sampled about 10, only one of them actually worked. So it is about hitting the genetic lottery.
Robyn Williams: Splendid stuff, but we'd often had rumours about, or evidence to some extent, about the early dogs being there because they're burials in what's now called Israel. And obviously human beings and dogs had some sort of close association. Obviously it wasn't necessarily what they called domestication because if you had campfires and the people had killed something or other, travelling dogs would be able to spot the leftovers and be waiting for them and eventually there'd be an understanding between the two groups. But now you've found something of evidence that may even have preceded that, do you think? Okay, so there's a couple of really interesting things you brought up there. The burials to begin with is a super interesting tangent because for a long time people have assumed that because something that looks like a dog that's buried with a human automatically makes a domestic animal. And I have a colleague here in Oxford who's just put out this paper that's about to come out where she's looking at all sorts of animal burials through time with people. And there's things like bears, there's things like sharks, animals we know that aren't domesticated but clearly had some spiritual or ritualistic role in the burial, suggesting that maybe just because we see something that looks like a dog, it could be a jackal, it could be a wolf, it could be any number of canid species across the world.
So while in this case these were puppies that were buried with people, that assumption held true. We can't use that as a marker of domestication. But the campfire thing is also very interesting because we have to kind of think about how this early relationship between humans and then wolves may have started.
And my pet theory is humans and wolves being brought into close proximity during the last glacial maximum. So when everyone was forced south, they had to live in these refugial populations, so small populations in areas that enabled them to survive. But they had to get along with one another because previously they would have been spread across the landscape and now they were forced into close proximity.
And I really like what you said before about a two-way relationship, because a lot of people put the onus on humans, that we went out and grabbed wolves and domesticated them, but they had to be amenable to this relationship as we were. I think they have enough agency in this as we do too.
Robyn Williams: Yes, incredible. Did you really make the front page of one of the great journals?
Lachie Scarsbrook: We did, yes. So us and another group at the Francis Crick Institute, they had another paper on early dogs and the spread of dogs along farmers into Europe from the Near East. We were presenting these earliest examples of dogs and because there was so much doggy goodness in this Nature issue, we got the cover. So there's a nice image of a hunter-gatherer with their dog looking over a landscape covered in snow. There's an aurora borealis in the sky. It's quite an emotional image.
Robyn Williams: Not a bad start really to a shining career, eh?
Lachie Scarsbrook: Yeah, I feel like I've set the bar a little bit too high for myself, coming straight out of a PhD, but I guess we'll see where I go.
Robyn Williams: Where do you intend to go, do you think, perhaps?
Lachie Scarsbrook: I think the goal for me is always to go back home. I don't know, something about taking all of these connections and skills back to New Zealand to be able to apply them to local questions again, but bring a network back that enables world-class research to be undertaken in New Zealand institutions. I think that's definitely the long-term goal, but for now, I think staying in Europe and living the life connected to all of these amazing labs, and especially here in Oxford, with all of the different societies and things that you can be a part of, and just learn is the key here.
Robyn Williams: Lachie Scarsbrook with his cover story in the journal Nature, one of many Australians, well, yes, let's claim him as we did Russell Crowe and Keith Urban. Lockie, loving Oxford, and that first dog research is really illuminating.
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