An 18,000 year old frozen puppy has been found in Siberia and scientists can’t decide if this is a dog or a wolf. Could this be one of the first ever Siberian Huskies ?
Now named Dogor, a local word for friend, it was found near Yakutsk in eastern Siberia.
The male’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.
The body’s age was measured by carbon dating its rib bone, but DNA tests have not confirmed its lineage.
David Stanton, a researcher at the Centre for Palaeogenetics in Sweden, said it was “normally relatively easy” to tell the difference between a dog and a wolf.
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.
That would chime with 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.
