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The best thing about dogs - besides what wonderfully good boys and girls they all are - is their sheer variety. From enormous great danes to tiny chihuahuas, flat-faced pugs and long-snouted borzois, there's a size and shape of dog for everyone. Even our unofficial SciShow dog Perry. Whatever he is. Conventional wisdom holds that this smorgasbord of doggy designs is all thanks to the breeding efforts of Victorian kennel clubs in the 1800s. But now, scientists have raised some doubts about that. It seems like dogs have always been weird - or at least for a very long time. [♪INTRO] In September 1865, the latest edition of Field magazine featured an illustration of a very good boy named Major.
Major was a pointer, a breed of dog used to help hunters find game. But Major wasn't just any pointer. He was the pointer. In that issue, English sports writer John Henry Walsh wrote detailed descriptions of Major, enumerating all the specs and stats that made this dog the standard against which all pointers could be judged. Walsh didn't stop there. He outlined standards for many dog breeds, as did other dog-enthusiasts of the time. This was the beginning of dog breeds as we know them. Dog breeders have been following the path of these formalized breed standards for the past two hundred years. With that history in mind, you might assume that all dogs
before the 1800s were kind of the same, a mish-mash of doggy traits without distinct shapes and sizes. If true, that would be a long history of same-ness, at least 10,000 years. Dogs were the first species that we humans successfully domesticated. Before horses, chickens, cats, or even crop plants, we had dogs. They really are man's best friend, aren't they? The oldest dog that has been genetically identified as a true domestic dog comes from an archaeological site called Veretye in Russia, just under 11,000 years old.
Even older than that, a site called Bonn-Oberkassel in Germany features a grave, around 15,000 years old, where two very dog-like skeletons were buried alongside a human. They really are man's best friend. Not just for life. For forever. The fact that these pups were intentionally buried with a human suggests they might have been part of the family. Meanwhile, some studies comparing the DNA of dogs and wolves have concluded that domestic dogs split from their wolf-y ancestors around 30,000 years ago. So, that's our timeline.
Somewhere between 30,000 and 11,000 years ago, at least one lineage of wolves made the transition - with human help - from wild animals to pets and partners. Trying to identify the first ancient dogs is a real challenge because the earliest dogs would have looked a whole lot like their wolf cousins. On top of that, large carnivores are pretty rare to begin with in the fossil and archaeological record, especially compared to large herbivores. And skull bones - which are some of the most informative parts of an ancient dog - are pretty fragile and tend to crumble before they can ever be dug up and studied.
Furthermore, an early dog that died near humans was pretty likely to become dinner, which can also be a hindrance to long-term preservation. So, we don't know for sure when dogs were domesticated, but certainly by around 11,000 years ago, ancient humans were living alongside doggy pals. Did we make dogs? Or did they make us? Just something to think about. Since modern dog breeds didn't come about until the 1800s, those early dogs are generally assumed to have been missing most of the anatomical diversity that we see in modern dogs. But you never know until you look closely. Which we will take a close look, right after we go to this quick break!
This SciShow video is supported by JMP: the statistical analysis software trusted by data scientists. JMP isn't your average statistical discovery company. They get that understanding data is a journey. And JMP is with you the whole way. JMP offers opportunities for statisticians to meet with developers and discuss their ideal products. That's not something that all companies do. One data scientist who relies on JMP said that she has not only used JMP for years, but also influenced the development of new functionalities JMP now has.
She said JMP developers and even executives listen to "ordinary users." And that kind of relationship between tool developer and end user isn't found just anywhere. To reap the benefits of visual statistics for yourself and get a 30-day free trial, visit jmp.com/scishow. So, a 2025 study looked closely at over 600 skulls of modern dogs, modern wolves, and ancient canines as old as 50,000 years. They used a technique called morphometrics to quantify the size and shape of these skulls. Essentially, they created a dataset of measurements and coordinates of features which could be compared from skull to skull.
Then, they fed that data into statistical software designed to identify patterns of differences. The first thing this analysis was able to do was distinguish dog skulls from wolf skulls. Not perfectly, of course. There's a lot of physical overlap between dogs and wolves. Even among modern breeds, a lot of dogs are very wolf-like. But the analysis identified more than 80 ancient skulls that were more anatomically similar to modern dogs versus modern wolves. The study classified these, along with modern dog skulls, as morphological dogs.
The oldest of these morphological dogs was that 11,000-year-old Russian specimen that had previously been genetically identified as a domestic dog. But beyond that, the study found that early dogs came in more varieties than expected. None of the ancient skulls were quite as long-snouted as borzois or as flat-faced as pugs, but they came in a surprisingly wide array of shapes and sizes. In fact, the skulls of the 43 oldest morphological dogs exhibited about half as much physical diversity as modern dogs, and twice as much as earlier skulls. These ancient skulls even included shapes similar to modern breeds like whippets and dachshunds. Or… dah-shin? Da-shuhn? Dock-sin? Dachshund.
Those early dogs didn't have quite the same range of sizes as modern breeds, and since this study only looked at the cranium, we can't say for sure if any of them had weiner-dog bodies. But the evidence is clear that early domestic dogs already came in a range of shapes, several thousand years ago. This variability was probably a result of differences in the dogs' environments and diets, plus the preferences of humans they lived with. These dogs weren't being bred to win Best in Show, but the wants and needs of their humans influenced their reproductive habits and had tangible effects on their doggy bodies.
This physical diversity lines up with genetic evidence that has found that multiple genetic lineages of domestic dogs had already diverged across Europe and Asia before 5,000 years ago. But it's not just human influence that was shaping these dogs. Some of this diversity was probably inherited directly from their wolf ancestors. The study found that ancient wolf skulls, while not nearly as variable as dogs, were more diverse in their shape than modern wolves. This is probably thanks to major declines in wolf populations over the past few centuries. Sadly, that's our fault. So, rather than being all the same until the Victorians tinkered with their pedigrees, dogs have been a glorious assortment of shapes and
sizes for thousands of years, and probably from the very start. Of course, this makes the search for the earliest dogs even more complicated. Not only would the first domestic dogs have looked a lot like wild wolves, they might have already been pretty anatomically diverse. Hopefully, there are more ancient dogs waiting to be uncovered at even older archaeological sites. Who knows, maybe someday we'll discover the ancient equivalent of a corgi!
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