Rosa Rubicondior: Refuting Creationism - More on the Domestication of Dogs

Cover picture for The Way of the Wolf: A Stone Age Epic

Canine companions: revealing the genetic history of our first friends | Crick

This is the second of my posts on the domestication of dogs and on why the facts are so awkward for creationists. It concerns research by a team led by Anders Bergström and Pontus Skoglund of the Francis Crick Institute, London, working with colleagues from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and a large international network of collaborators.

The team have shown that the domestication of dogs had already begun well before the invention of farming, when humans in Europe still lived in nomadic bands of hunter-gatherers. At that stage, dogs would have been hunting companions, sentinel guards for encampments, and perhaps even family pets, long before they were adapted for the many tasks later associated with farming, such as herding livestock and guarding flocks. Their findings are published in Nature.

This establishes dogs as the first domestic animals and suggests that the human-dog relationship may have helped lay the groundwork for later animal husbandry and selective breeding.

The story of the domestication of dogs from wolves is something in which I have long taken a special interest, and it was that interest which led me to write two books with fictionalised accounts of how it may have happened - The Girl and the Wolf and its sequel, The Way of the Wolf: A Stone Age Epic.

Biologically, of course, this evolved symbiotic relationship between two species is exactly the sort of outcome the Theory of Evolution leads us to expect. But, embarrassingly for creationists, it also tells a story rooted in deep time, for which creationism has no credible explanation. Worse still for biblical literalists, it makes a mockery of the claim that God created all animals for the benefit of humankind, because that claim presupposes that animals created by an omniscient, omnipotent designer would already be fit for purpose and would not need extensive modification by human selective breeding.

The researchers reached their conclusions by analysing DNA from 216 canid skeletal remains, including 181 pre-Neolithic samples - that is, from before approximately 10,000 years ago. These remains came from sites across Europe and nearby regions, including Switzerland, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Turkey, Sweden, Denmark and Scotland.

Creationists previously had a little wriggle room when the earliest indisputable domestic dog was thought to date to about 10,900 years ago. They could at least pretend that dogs appeared during their imaginary ‘Creation Week’ or shortly afterwards. That pretence is now no longer sustainable. This study shows that the ancestry of later dogs was already established before 14,200 years ago, and probably earlier still.

How do palaeontologists tell dog remains from wolf remains? At first glance, they often can’t — at least, not with complete confidence from a single bone. Early dogs had only recently diverged from wolves, so their skeletons could still be very similar. That is why many supposed “earliest dogs” have remained controversial for years. [1.1]

Skull and jaw shape
Researchers look for trends associated with domestication, such as a shorter snout, smaller skull, reduced tooth size, or crowding of the teeth. But these are tendencies, not foolproof markers, because wild wolves also vary naturally in size and shape. [2.1]

Detailed shape analysis
Modern studies often use 3D geometric morphometrics — a way of comparing the precise shape of skulls and jaws using many anatomical landmarks. This is much more reliable than simply measuring length and width with a ruler. [3.1]

Ancient DNA
The strongest evidence now comes from ancient DNA. Genetics can show whether a specimen belongs to a dog lineage even when its bones still look very wolf-like. That is why the new Nature study is so important: it does not rely on guesswork from bones alone. [2.1]

Archaeological context
Scientists also look at where the bones were found. A canid buried with humans, found repeatedly at campsites, or showing signs of close association with people is more likely to have been a dog than a wild wolf. [4.1]

The key point
So, palaeontologists do not usually identify an early dog by one “magic feature”. The best cases are those where anatomy, DNA and archaeological context all point to the same conclusion. That is why the evidence for very early dogs has become much stronger in recent years. [2.1]

The work of the team is explained in a Francis Crick Institute news release:

Canine companions: revealing the genetic history of our first friends
The largest ancient DNA study of canid remains to date sheds light on how the first farmers adopted hunter-gatherer dogs and highlights that dog domestication happened before 14,000 years ago.
Recent estimates suggest that the UK is home to nearly 13 million pet dogs – about one in three households. Dogs have been ‘man’s best friend’ throughout living history, but when did we first adopt these furry companions, and how have they evolved since then?

For Pontus Skoglund, leader of the Crick’s Ancient Genomics Laboratory, tracing the genetic evolution of dogs is another way to follow the footsteps of our ancestors as they faced and adapted to environmental challenges.
Dogs were the first animal to form a domestic relationship with humans, towards the end of the last Ice Age – even before the advent of farming. But we haven’t yet pinpointed where and how dogs were first domesticated from wolves, especially as it has typically been hard to tell early dogs from wolves, and trace how these first dogs expanded across the world.

Pontus Skoglund, co-lead author.
Ancient Genomics Laboratory
The Francis Crick Institute
London, UK.

The largest study of canid remains to date

Pontus and Anders Bergström, Lecturer at the University of East Anglia and former postdoc at the Crick, deployed advanced genetic techniques to distinguish dogs from their wild cousins, in research published today in Nature.
Working with researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and a large network of international collaborators, Pontus and Anders analysed DNA from 216 canid skeletal remains, including 181 pre-Neolithic samples (before approx. 10,000 years ago), before the invention of farming. These samples came from sites across Europe and its vicinity, including Switzerland, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Turkey, Sweden, Denmark and Scotland.

Excavation of the Kesslerloch cave in Switzerland, one of the sites in the study, under Jakob Heierli in 1903.

© Cantonal Archaeological Service (KASH) of Schaffhausen, archive.

Due to the age of the dogs studied, and the large amount of contamination from microbes, the amount of canid DNA in most of the samples was low. We used a technique called ‘hybridisation capture’ to boost the amount of usable DNA. This involved identifying genetic variants that are present in current-day grey wolves and ‘‘fishing’ only these out of the ancient canid samples.

Anders Bergström, co-lead author.
School of Biological Sciences
University of East Anglia
Norwich, UK.

A wolf in dog's clothing

Once hybridisation capture had successfully separated canid DNA from DNA from contaminants like bacteria or other microbes, the first step was to begin the wolf vs. dog classification.

We worked out how similar each sample is to a present-day dog. We managed to classify a remarkable 141 out of 216 remains, with some surprises. For example, a 13,700-year-old canid from Belgium, previously thought to be a dog due to its small size and traces of human modification, turned out to be a wolf. This highlighted that it is not always easy to tell a dog from a wolf based on skeletal evidence alone.”.

Pontus Skoglund.

The really exciting finding was that a proposed dog from the Kesslerloch cave in Switzerland was genetically a dog: at 14,200 years old, it’s one of the oldest European dogs confirmed by genetics. It joins a 15,800-year-old dog from Türkiye, analysed as part of a related study into the earliest genetic evidence for domesticated dogs in Türkiye and Europe, also published in Nature today and led by the Natural History Museum, the University of Oxford and LMU Munich.

The last estimated ‘oldest dog’ DNA is 10,900 years old; now the horizon is much further back into the past.

Pontus Skoglund.
Dog maxilla

Maxilla of the domesticated dog from the Kesslerloch cave in Thayngen, Switzerland.

© Cantonal Archaeological Service (KASH) of Schaffhausen.
Photo: Ivan Ivic.

You can't teach an old dog new tricks

Another question for ancient genomicists is whether dogs were domesticated separately in different locations. Previous work from Pontus and team showed that dogs derive most of their ancestry from two distinct wolf sources, one from eastern Eurasia and one from western Eurasia. Using a statistical model, the researchers showed that all the early European dogs in this study can trace their origins to the eastern wolf source, with some showing small amounts of ancestry from the western wolf source.

So, European wolves didn’t contribute detectably to dog evolution, and there’s no evidence that European dogs would have undergone an independent domestication process separate from dogs in Asia, as both share the same ancestry profile.

Anders Bergström.

The Kesslerloch dog was already genetically more similar to European dogs than to Asian dogs, suggesting that dogs were domesticated well before 14,200 years ago, to give time for European and Asian dogs to become genetically different by this time.

The first farmers adopted hunter-gatherer dogs

The spread of farming into Europe accompanied a large-scale migration of people from Southwest Asia in the Neolithic period. By modelling the ancestry of European dogs after the arrival of Neolithic farmers, the team showed that the dog genetic changes largely mirrored the changes in human genetics, but to a much smaller degree.

Reenactment scene in front of the Kesslerloch cave in Thayngen, Switzerland.

© Cantonal Archaeological Service (KASH) of Schaffhausen.
Photo: Luisa Kehl.

Dogs from local hunter-gatherer groups already living in Europe contributed substantially to the genetics of dog populations living with Neolithic farmers, so these native dogs were likely adopted by the first farmers. This contrasts, for example, with the colonial expansion into the Americas, where native dogs were almost entirely replaced by the incoming European dogs.

Pontus Skoglund.

The legacy of these European hunter-gatherer dogs is still around today, with most popular European dog breeds tracing about half of their ancestry to the dogs that lived in Europe before farming.
Most of the dogs running about in a local park today trace some of their ancestry to dogs living in Europe over 14,000 years ago. It’s fascinating that we’ve walked alongside each other for so many thousands of years, despite considerable changes in human lifestyles.

Pontus Skoglund.

Publication:
Bergström, A., Furtwängler, A., Johnston, S. et al.
Genomic history of early dogs in Europe. Nature 651, 986–994 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10112-7

Abstract
The earliest morphologically identifiable dogs are from Europe and date to at least 14,000 years ago^1,2,3,4,5, although early remains are also found in other regions. The origin of early dogs in Europe, and their relationships to other dogs, has remained elusive in the absence of genome-wide data. Similarly, although dogs were the only domestic animal to predate agriculture, little is known about how the arrival of Neolithic farmers from Southwest Asia affected the dogs living with European Mesolithic hunter-gatherers. Here we analysed 216 canid remains, including 181 from Palaeolithic and Mesolithic Europe. We developed a genome-wide capture approach that enriched endogenous DNA by 10–100-fold and could distinguish dog from wolf ancestry for 141 of 216 remains. The oldest dog data that we recovered are from a 14,200-year-old dog from the Kesslerloch site in Switzerland, and we find that it shares ancestry with later worldwide dogs—inconsistent with the hypothesis that European Upper Palaeolithic dogs derived wholly from a separate domestication process. The Kesslerloch dog already displays more affinity to Mesolithic, Neolithic and present-day European dogs than to Asian dogs, demonstrating that dog genetic diversification had started well before 14,200 years ago. We find a Neolithic influx of Southwest Asian ancestry into Europe, but this seems to have been of smaller magnitude than in humans, suggesting that Mesolithic dogs contributed substantially to Neolithic, and, ultimately, probably also modern, European dogs.

Bergström, A., Furtwängler, A., Johnston, S. et al.
Genomic history of early dogs in Europe. Nature 651, 986–994 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10112-7

Copyright: © 2026 The authors.
Published by Springer Nature Ltd. Open access.
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)

What this study exposes is the sheer poverty of the creationist position. Dogs were not magically created in finished form for human convenience, as the biblical myth would require. They were shaped over millennia out of a wolf ancestry through a long, messy, entirely natural process of co-existence, selection and adaptation. In other words, exactly what evolution predicts, and exactly what creationism cannot accommodate without evasions and excuses.

The dates make that failure even harder to hide. The ancestry of domestic dogs is now traced back well before agriculture and far beyond the narrow little timescale that young-Earth creationists try to impose on reality. Yet again, the facts do not merely fail to support Genesis; they make it look like what it is — a collection of simplistic origin tales from a people who knew nothing of genetics, archaeology, evolution or deep time.

And that is the real lesson here. Science can reconstruct the history of the human-dog relationship because it works from evidence and is willing to follow that evidence wherever it leads. Creationism begins with a conclusion and then spends its time trying to twist, ignore or misrepresent inconvenient facts. The result is that every new discovery like this widens the gulf between what the evidence shows and what creationists need to believe. Far from supporting special creation, the domestication of dogs stands as yet another clear example of evolution in action, unfolding over thousands of years in a world far older and far more interesting than biblical literalism allows.

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