33.000 year old canine skull
A Russian-led international team of archaeologists has found a 33,000 year old canine skull from a cave in the Siberian Altai mountains. The remains are among the oldest every found near human remains. The skull is different from modern dogs or wolves in some ways but the the mouth is similar in size to early, fully domesticated Greenland dogs from 1,000 years ago, but its very large teeth look like those of 31,000 year-old wild European wolves. According to evolutionary biologist Dr. Susan Crockford of Pacific Identifications, these qualities indicate a dog in the very early stages of domestication.
Wolves were not deliberately domesticated by these early humans at this time, people were hunting animals in large numbers and leaving large piles of bones behind, and that was attracting the wolves to the areas around where they were living. The least fearful wolves had more juvenile characteristics with shorter, wider snouts and smaller, more crowded teeth that came to define the domesticated dog over the course of time.
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