Britain's First Dog

Fifteen thousand years ago, as the Ice Age loosened its grip on Northern Europe, humans returned to the previously inhospitable British Isles. But they did not come alone. Among their number was a companion once thought to be an impossibility: Britain's earliest known dog. In this episode of The Ancients, Tristan Hughes Dr. Selina Brace and Dr. William Marsh from the Natural History Museum to explore groundbreaking new research from Gough’s Cave that is reshaping our understanding of humans and dogs in Ice Age Britain. Together they uncover the story of a remarkable discovery: ancient remains once believed to belong to a wolf, now identified as Britain’s oldest known domesticated dog. How did this dog live alongside prehistoric hunter-gatherers? And how is this discovery changing what we thought we knew about the arrival of dogs in Britain? MORE The First Dogs: Listen on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-ancients/id1520403988?i=1000643552587 Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/6fpF68aiJUIbMv6AzXxfC6?si=z52vZY8vTfOkkFawZD-9ow End of the Ice Age Britain: Listen on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-ancients/id1520403988?i=1000694734588 Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/6wYzp7wrHLqXmKMvG2okz4?si=4T90KftMQtiV86OS0c4f1w Presented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Aidan Lonergan. The producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. All music courtesy of Epidemic Sounds The Ancients is a History Hit podcast. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tristan Hughes?

  Ever wondered why the Romans were defeated in the Teutoburg Forest? What secrets lie buried in prehistoric Ireland? Or what made Alexander truly great? With a subscription to History Hit, you can explore our ancient past alongside the world's leading historians and archaeologists. You'll also unlock hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a brand new release every single week, covering everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe. Hello and welcome to a very special episode of The Ancients, where we're doing some breaking news. You might have seen very recently, it's been announced that Britain's earliest known dog

• 0:43Tristan Hughes?

  has been discovered some 15,000 years ago. It was living in Gough's Cave in Cheddar Gorge. Now, I've got my own dog right next to me at the moment. We've got Gummer, he's being a menace as always, this lovely spaniel. And yes, Gummer, today we're talking about your 15,000-year-old Ice Age ancestor, Britain's first dog. Today, we've got on the show two of the authors of that brand new paper. We've got Dr William Marsh and Dr Selena Brace, and they're on to tell you all about this brand new discovery and the amazing world it's opening up, and a world of Ice Age dogs in Britain, in Western Europe. Let's go. Good boy.

• 1:37Tristan Hughes?

  The Ice Age, an age of megafauna, glacial landscapes, and our prehistoric hunter-gatherer ancestors. In Britain, 15,000 years ago, much of the landmass had been uninhabitable, covered in either ice or tundra wasteland. But things were changing. The climate was warming and life was returning. First came the herds of deer, horse and mammoth, crossing the great land bridge that at that time connected Britain with Europe. And then came humans, following the herds northwards. But these early groups, they didn't return on their own. They also brought dogs.

• 2:21Tristan Hughes?

  We now know this for sure, thanks to Brad's new research on remains found at Goff's Cave in Somerset. Remains thought by researchers to belong to a wild wolf, but in fact belong to a domesticated dog. So what has this research revealed about Britain's newest Ice Age pooch? How close a relationship did it have with the humans that also occupied Goff's Cave 15,000 years ago, both during its life and after its death? This is the breaking news story of Britain's first known dog and what we know so far, with researchers Dr William Marsh and Dr Selina Brace.

• 3:11Tristan Hughes?

  Selena, William, it is great to have you both on the podcast. Welcome to the show.

• 3:16Speaker 02

  Thanks for inviting us. It's lovely to be here.

• 3:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, thanks, Trish, and thanks for having us.

• 3:20Tristan Hughes?

  You guys are more than welcome, especially for this. It feels like a breaking news story. The fact that Britain's oldest dog, or should we say earliest known dog, is 15,000 years old. Selena, it's great.

• 3:34Speaker 02

  I think that definitely constitutes as an exceptionally good workday, when you realise that we've managed to sequence Britain's oldest dog, that's for sure.

• 3:42Tristan Hughes?

  And how much of a surprise was it to make this discovery?

• 3:46Speaker 02

  Well, kind of yes and no. Yes, it's always a surprise. You know, we're working with ancient fragmented DNA, so we're always relieved when it works, when you get a result. But should we have been surprised? Well, we've been working on the site for a number of years, so we know that the DNA is actually has very good preservation there. And we've also known that it was quite likely that dogs existed there. So the clues were already there, but it took a little while for the genetics and the genetic capabilities to catch up. So yeah, for everything to align as well as it did, yeah, that's always a good surprise.

• 4:22Speaker 03

  I remember vividly the moment when I saw the initial DNA results and I think it was it was an expletive ridden response to seeing the fact that yes, we had first of all, very, very good DNA preservation from this specimen. But secondly, that it was a dog because there's been a sort of lots of academic focus on Goff's Cave, the site over the last sort of thirty, forty years. And this particular specimen was sampled back in the early 2000s for DNA analysis. But our methods were so unadvanced at that point, it just it just didn't work. And then in 2010, we had a some other colleagues of a museum looked at it, looked at the morphology of it and found that it was very, very small compared to other wolves. And they, in a very,

• 5:07Speaker 03

  very niche text, said, perhaps this is a an example of a of a domestic dog. But the only true sort of empirical way to know this is through DNA analysis. And we did a DNA analysis in twenty, yeah, twenty twenty three, twenty twenty four, as part of my PhD. And yeah, it's all come from there, really.

• 5:26Tristan Hughes?

  I also love this story because William and Selena, I've met you both before. We've done stuff on this site, Goff's Cave, that we're going to get into in a bit. But it's a lovely story how, Selena, I've done interviews with you in the past. You are such an expert in the DNA field, whether it's Cheddar Man, skeletons at Stonehenge and so on. And William, of course, you know, this is your your PhD and you've got a background in it as well. To see you both working together on this project is lovely. So you guys, you guys are quite a team in making these discoveries.

• 5:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, we've been really lucky to work together for a number of years now. So getting to work on Goff's Caves for so long is is been incredibly special.

• 6:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, I I first heard about ancient DNA, the field, from a talk which Selena gave to me in 2019. And from there, we've been tied up a hip.

• 6:15Speaker 03

  You probably want to get rid of me now.

• 6:17Speaker 02

  No, never.

• 6:19Tristan Hughes?

  I also think in today's age, the fact that the first words out of your mouth was an expletive and not a eureka or a blimey or golly, I think that emphasizes once again just the significance of the discovery because I think you're quite right to have an expletive as the first word.

• 6:33Speaker 03

  Maybe it tells you more about me as a person perhaps.

• 6:37Tristan Hughes?

  So Selena, we've mentioned it already now, Goffs Cave. So what is this location that, as you've already mentioned, you know, people have known a lot about it for quite some time?

• 6:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. So although we first saw the dog in the N H M collections, the dog was initially found in Goffs Cave in Cheddar Gorge in Somerset. So as I've said, we've worked on Cheddar Gorge for a number of years now. It's an amazing site. It's a limestone cave that people can go and visit, go and see. It's got these amazing stalagmites. But it's also been, as you mentioned, an absolute treasure trove for significant archaeological finds over the years. So the cave itself, or the particular assemblage, the group of bones and material that we're talking about now, where this dog has been found, dates

• 7:27Speaker 02

  to around the period of around 15,000 years. So this is a period of climate warming. So this is after the end of the last ice age. So when Britain would have been covered by ice sheets, at this point at 15,000 years, the ice sheets would have been retreating and plants and animals would have been recolonizing Britain and humans also returning at this time point. And they would have been occupying this cave, probably as kind of seasonal. It wasn't like they necessarily lived there. It was more like people were going to the cave as a seasonal thing, either perhaps to meet or for feasts. We don't know exactly,

• 8:10Speaker 02

  of course, but they were certainly occupying this cave at different periods during this time, 15,000 years ago.

• 8:16Tristan Hughes?

  And is this a time period then, so after one of the coldest periods in ice age history, the last glacial maximum, a period when it's believed that humans left Britain altogether, but at some 15,000 years ago, so around that time, is evidence of small groups of humans coming back and a site like Goffs Cave is one of the greatest cave sites in the area, maybe even in southern Britain, where people can live for small amounts of time?

• 8:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, I would say so. So at around twenty thousand years, which is when glaciation was at its peak, human and faunal animal populations, plant populations couldn't inhabit these northern latitudes. So I think it's like the whole of Denmark from like north of maybe Birmingham was all covered in ice sheets. And for another two hundred, three hundred miles south, we'd all been completely uninhabitable. So human populations were restricted to these glacial refuges in two main glacial refuges in Europe at the time. One was sort of the Italy Balkans region, and one was in southern France and northern Spain. And these individuals who we find at Goff's Cave are called the Magdalene,

• 9:24Speaker 03

  and they stem from this refugia in southern France and northern Spain. So essentially, as the ice sheets retreated, these groups of small hunter-gatherers, they are dependent on hunting terrestrial fauna, so wild horses, reindeer, things like that. Their prey essentially would have been moving northwards, and they would have been tracking the prey northwards. And we see an increase of these Magdalene sites across northern Europe, across Germany, across Poland, between about eighteen and fifteen thousand. But the one, the assemblage at Goff's Cave is one of the largest, and one of the most rich in terms of not only human remains, but also artefacts and lithic technologies.

• 10:09Speaker 03

  And we have this incredible funerary behaviour of funerary cannibalism. So rather than burying their dead, as we might do, or cremate their dead, they were eating, eating their dead.

• 10:21Tristan Hughes?

  All right, don't reveal too much too quickly there, William. We're going to get to that, especially with the story, but

• 10:26Speaker 03

  I've jumped ahead.

• 10:27Tristan Hughes?

  No, you have not. You have teased what is to come with the story, but it's a fascinating example, isn't it? Of humans coming back, of living in these caves, an amazing glimpse into life in Britain in the last few thousand years of the Ice Age. So let's go to the dog remains. Selena, how much of the dog was discovered? How many remains do you have? Or did you guys have to learn to make this research?

• 10:53Speaker 02

  Okay, so there is an awful lot of fragmentary bone material at this site. There's loads of animal bone and remains, and many of these can't actually even be morphologically identified.

• 11:07Speaker 02

  So we know that there's a lot of difference. So canid remains. So these could be morphologically identified as belonging to the canid family, so either dog or wolf. But the particular sample that we're talking about today, the one that we've done this, all this genetic work on, is actually a mandible. So this is the dog's lower jaw, and it was complete also with teeth. So the dog mandible was found as part of this paleolithic assemblage. So these human remains, but these animal remains and lithics or tools that we know come from this paleolithic period. They found this undisturbed sediment that had been protected by a fallen block near the cave entrance.

• 11:52Speaker 02

  And it's within this material that this mandible was found and had then been donated to the Natural History Museum. So it's a cave that is a site and an assemblage that contains lots of different types of material, so human and animal.

• 12:06Tristan Hughes?

  And so you have the remains of this dog, you have the mandible, and you mentioned earlier how with advancements in, in technology that we're able to learn more about it and DNA and so on. So William, what methods did you guys have to garner as much information as possible from this mandible with teeth on it as well?

• 12:25Speaker 03

  So we had sort of three main biomolecular methods is what we call them. So the first is obviously ancient DNA, which is what Selena and I specialise in. We also have perhaps the most important method, which is radiocarbon dating. So this is looking, this is measuring the isotope value of carbon 14 in the collagen. And essentially, once the individual is deposited, the carbon 14 is an radioactive isotope. So it begins to degrade. So it has a half-life, I think it's of like 720 years or something like that. So essentially, you can track the proportion of carbon 14 to carbon 13, and that tells you the

• 13:09Speaker 03

  Age, you can predict the age of an element. And we did that for this mandible at Gough's Cave. And it came out as about fourteen and a half thousand years old, which is very similar or almost completely identical, let's say, to all the human remains, which had also been samples for radiocarbon dating and also some faunal remains. So we have a very, very tight sort of age range from about fifteen point one thousand years ago to fourteen point two thousand years ago, where we know that these Magellan groups were using Gough's Cave. And alongside of the third method is called dietary isotope analysis. So this gives you an insight into what humans and dogs were eating, based on their carbon and nitrogen values.

• 13:53Tristan Hughes?

  I must ask, because I saw these words in your paper and they just intrigue me. Selena, how do the words nuclear genome data fit into this?

• 14:03Speaker 02

  Okay, so nuclear genome data, this is basically the DNA. This is the DNA, not of the mitochondrial genome, which is a very small genome, but the nuclear DNA is basically your DNA instruction manual. It's what tells the cells to make either a person a person, or in this case, a dog a dog. So it gives you the, it gives all dogs the same characteristics that makes them dogs, but it's also what makes a Great Dane different from a poodle and every spaniel sort of slightly different from every other spaniel, if you know what I mean. It's the bits that make you the same and it's the bits that make you different, all encoded in our nuclear DNA.

• 14:44Tristan Hughes?

  And so as we go on to a bit more about the dog itself, one last question on the context, you mentioned how obviously this dog mandible was not found in isolation. These other remains, human and faunal, dating to around fifteen thousand years ago in Gough's Cave. Just to summarise, so we have the best possible context, the best possible idea of how many different types of remains we have alongside the dog. Can you explain to us, Selena, what we do have from Gough's Cave from some fifteen thousand years ago alongside this mandible?

• 15:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, so there are a lot of other bones at this site. So we have both herbivores and carnivores. So these include things like red deer, horse and auroch, which is like a large extinct cattle. And these remains have often been butchered by humans. So you see signs of cut marks and defleshing. There's also human artefacts at this site. So we have things such as perforated batons, which are these like deer antlers, we have like holes in them. And you have needles, you have napping tools. So these are the things that people use to like shape stone. And of course, we have a really cool engraved human arm bone.

• 15:56Speaker 02

  This engraved is beautifully artistically engraved with this zigzag pattern, very, very cool. But of course, we also have these, these human remains at the site as well. And the human remains are highly fragmented. We have over 200 small fragments of, of, of people. But perhaps what was most exciting about, or most interesting about these people is that most of them have signs of post-mortem human modification. So these are, this is our way of saying it looks like these people were cannibalised, okay? So for the faint-hearted amongst us, you know, bloggers are here now, but we, we do see that they have cut marks.

• 16:40Speaker 02

  They have human teeth marks, chew marks, scraping marks. So yeah, very clearly, these are the remains of people who have been eaten by other people. But we also find these very cool cranial vaults. So this is where the skull caps have been very carefully removed and modified into what have been interpreted as like skull caps or set of skull cups. So these were found alongside the animal remains and of course, what we now know to be a dog.

• 17:10Speaker 03

  And we see examples, although Goss Cave is exceptional in how large it is in terms of the amount of material which we have, lithics, faunal remains, human remains. You actually see other examples of this, of these. Cannibalistic behaviours across the Magdalene, across Europe. So I think there's 13 sites where you see this cannibalism, six which have skull cups. So it shows that Goff's Cave was obviously a unique site in itself, but also linked to a sort of wider population across content of Europe at the time.

• 17:44Tristan Hughes?

  And just to clarify there, because you mentioned it earlier as well, William. So when we say lithic, do we mean kind of stone tools, technology?

• 17:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, stone tools, yeah. Stone tool technology. And these stone tools technologies would be sort of, although unique is probably not the right word, but indo-syncretic of the Magdalene. So Magdalans would have their own sort of type of lithic or stone tool technologies compared to other hunter gatherer groups, other hunter gatherer cultures of the same period.

• 18:17Speaker 04

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• 19:01Speaker 04

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• 19:20Tristan Hughes?

  So let's get on to the dog itself. William, when you were doing this research alongside Selena, how did you find out that this mandible belonged to a dog and not a wolf? Because surely that is quite difficult to distinguish between the two when the bones, when the remains are some 15,000 years old.

• 19:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was pretty tricky to be honest and. What we had to do is essentially drill a hole in the bone, get some bone powder, extract the DNA from this bone powder and then sequence this on very, very large and expensive DNA sequencing machines. The thing about ancient DNA is that it's very, very fragmented. So if I was to take a drop of your blood Tristan now, it would have more DNA in it than probably 500 samples at the Natural History Museum. And not only would you have more of it, more of your own DNA, but also it would be very, very long compared to the ancient DNA in these samples. Because as when Indisent dies, the DNA begins to break down, gets very, very shorter and gets more and more damaged.

• 20:25Speaker 03

  So that's what we're having to deal with when we're talking about ancient DNA. Because it's 15,000 years ago, that degradation has occurred for a very, very long period. So, yes, we had to do a lot of very specialist lab methods, draw out these very, very small DNA fragments. But once we had the DNA, once we had enough of the DNA, it's actually fairly straightforward to run the analyses. Because grey wolves, which is the wild version of a dog essentially, all dogs derive from a grey wolf population, they are genetically very, very distinct from a dog population. The ones you have the DNA, you can run a very, very simple test, essentially comparing the DNA of our sample with a modern dog and a modern wolf.

• 21:06Speaker 03

  And in our case, our sample was far more similar to the dog than it was to the grey wolf. And at that point, that was the eureka moment.

• 21:14Tristan Hughes?

  Selena, am I correct that, I mean, do we know much about wolves 15,000 years ago as well? Am I correct that there is also a wolf discovered in Goff's Cave alongside the dog?

• 21:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, so there were wolves also around at this time point. And as I said, we have lots of fragmentary canid remains at the Goff's Cave site, even within this assemblage. So we have looked at several of those to see if we could identify genetically more more dogs from the site. There is a tantalizing, tantalizingly so that there is another dog there, but the DNA isn't as well preserved. But we can definitely say that one of the other canid remains that we looked at is in fact a wolf. So yeah, so morphologically, the the less amount of material that you find, the harder it is to distinguish between the two just by looking at the bones. Because of course, you're just looking at the size and if you don't have a big enough fragment, you can't tell.

• 22:09Speaker 02

  And that's where the DNA comes in. Because I would say, you know, wha- what is amazing is that, yes, there's all these millions of parts of the genome that that look different in dogs and wolves. And if you look at dogs and wolves today, they they are different species. So yes, of course, you'd expect these millions of things. But the fact that we see these in this dog for fifteen thousand years ago, it's amazing that that's still the case, you know, it's brilliant. It was, yeah, really cool.

• 22:38Speaker 03

  One might think we were so, we're getting closer and closer to the time dogs were domesticated. One might think at this point, dogs and wolves were genetically more similar, but but not not really. We see the same distinction fifteen thousand years ago as we do today between dogs and between dogs and wolves, which is quite remarkable.

• 22:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, I completely agree. It's just, it's quite, it's just amazing that they are actually already that different. So, you know, to put it into another context, what it means is these Paleolithic dogs are already more similar to modern dogs, you know, Fido at home than than than they are to these ancient wolves from the same time. That kind of like blew my mind, to be honest. It's, yeah, it's crazy.

• 23:22Tristan Hughes?

  I mean, this is what I was wanting us to get towards, was the fact that if you've got a wolf, evidence of a wolf at Gough's Cave, at the same time that you've got evidence of a dog in these humans' populations, to try and get in my mind how similar this Ice Age dog and that Ice Age wolf would have been, how distinguishable they would have been to these human peoples at that time. But from what you guys are saying, actually, yes, there would have been clear differences between the two.

• 23:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, but probably like it's it's hard to know what the dog would have looked like, probably very, very similar to wolf. But behaviourally, it probably would have been behaving in a very, very different manner to the wolf.

• 23:55Speaker 02

  I hope it was behaving differently, William, otherwise they might have had a bit of a problem.

• 23:59Speaker 03

  The mythic captain obvious over here, you would have already seen this, yeah, genetically divergence, not much breeding between grey wolf and dog populations, but perhaps the greatest barrier to gene flow, that this is breeding between the two species, would have been the dog's association with with these humans. Essentially such a strong barrier that if a dog was to mate with a with a grey wolf, it's highly likely that that hybrid individual would have A, been probably too aggressive to be associated with the humans at the time. But B, also not be accepted within the grey wolf populations, within the grey wolf pack. So would have almost certainly not have reproduced.

• 24:43Speaker 03

  And it's that really strong barrier to genetic drift, which probably will initially cause that divergence between wolves and dogs. But going back to something which Selena says, a little bit more off topic here. There's been so many claims of dogs in the Paleolithic, usually based on morphology. So I think that one of our earliest claims was thirty six thousand years ago from a site in Goyet Cave. So this is a site in Belgium. And these researchers were completely convinced that this canid was a dog based on morphology, based on its deposition environment. But our collaborators over at Oxford did the DNA on it. It turns out it's just an extinct population of grey wolves. It's very wolfy.

• 25:27Speaker 03

  And there are ten or twelve examples of more recent. So thirty six, thirty two, thirty thousand, twenty eight thousand of these dogs, which when you do the DNA analysis, they just come out with the wolves. They are essentially wolves. So actually finding a dog this old has been tried many, many times before. And we were very fortunate to be the first people to actually have cracked it.

• 25:50Tristan Hughes?

  Sorry to go a bit into theory here now, because I think this is probably something that we can't figure out even from the surviving evidence. But could we assume then that the dog with the people at Goff's Cave was obviously a dog that lived with the people, you know, wasn't too aggressive with them, was part of almost, we could think, the community, like a modern dog. But the wolf at Goff's Cave, although dating to a similar time period, just what we know from, you know, behaviourally and DNA and the fact that it's a wolf, was this clearly, you know, this was a wild animal, this could have been hunted by the human population. Or it could have just been living at the cave at a different time. It wouldn't have been part of that small human group. Selena.

• 26:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's correct. I think that's the assumption that we would make from this. I mean, you did not see signs of modification of the wolf. So the wolf, the wolf, sorry, has not been butchered. The wolf, we, we see no signs of any kind of modification in that way. And also, as we say, this is that the people at Goss Cave were likely occupying the cave seasonally. They weren't there all the time. So it's more likely perhaps that this wolf was coming in, even at a completely different time point to the, to the humans. We can't say for sure, obviously. You know, our, our radiocarbon dating isn't that good to put it down to very precise dates.

• 27:12Speaker 02

  But, you know, one could imagine that this cave was being used by, you know, wild animals as people were, animals were scavenging in there as well as humans using it as a butchery site. So we can't really tease it apart, but it seems more likely that it would have been a separate occasion that this wolf would have entered the cave.

• 27:30Speaker 03

  But what's interesting here is that the grey wolves would have been hunting the same thing as the humans would have been hunting. So they would have been tracking the reindeer as they seasonally migrated around. The humans have been tracking them, but so would have the grey wolves. Same place, same time. No direct association, but almost certainly in competition to, to a degree with one another.

• 27:51Tristan Hughes?

  So we've already talked about from the data that you've gathered from this dog mandible, how it's revealed the age of the dog, the closeness to modern day dogs compared to wolves. But Selena, what other information about this dog have you been able to gather? Have you been able to ascertain from the surviving mandible?

• 28:16Speaker 02

  So, yeah, we sort of like hinted at this a little bit earlier and this, this is actually the isotopic data that we use to look at the wolf. And as William says, this is about, this tells us about diet. It, you, we've used it a lot more in the past in sort of like archaeological studies to assess past human diets. Because as we said, this is looking at those differences in carbon and nitrogen. Nitrogen in particular tells us about tropic level. So the position that an animal occupies in the food chain. So like a high level carnivore versus a mid level omnivore versus a low level sort of herbivore.

• 28:59Speaker 02

  So yeah, this kind of analysis doesn't actually provide us like with a menu card of like their last supper or anything like that. But it does allow us to compare the values across different species. And in this case, we were able to look at the nitrogen values from both the human remains at the site. And the animal and the dog remains at the site. And when we looked at this, we see that there were these dietary similarities across the dogs and the humans. And that they have a very similar diet and a similar degree of omnivory. So obviously what we kind of like, what one draws from this is there's a possibility they were sharing the same diet.

• 29:40Speaker 02

  As in the humans were potentially feeding the dogs the same things that they were eating, which is really exciting. I have to add, because you know, we're scientists and that's what we do. There is a tiny caveat with this in that it isn't quite as clear cut as that being definitive. Because when we looked at that wolf, you remember we had that wolf at the cave as well. They also show a very similar value. So it's not quite as clear as they were exactly, you know, just exclusively sharing their dinner. But it's, you know, it does still very much point to shared lives and this closeness and a close bond between them as well.

• 30:19Tristan Hughes?

  William, I remember doing an interview with Dr Angela Perry a couple of years ago on like the earliest dogs and the importance of leftovers. In the story of of dog domestication and we'll put a link in the description to our chat with Angela, Dr Angela Perry as well about that, where she explores more about that. But we'll get to dog domestication in a bit, but could we imagine a scenario where these people in Goffs Cave, as Selena says, it's not completely clear. But you know, they were having their dinner and then what they didn't eat, the leftovers were given to the dog in their community, were given to the dog in Goffs Cave at that time.

• 30:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, that's almost, almost certainly a possibility. And I don't really want to muddy the waters here, but I am going to. I'm going to bring in another site from the same study which we've been, in which we've analysed this Goff Cave dog. Another site in Turkey. So this is very, very similar age. You have a dog here, genetically identified dog. You also have humans. Now, the humans at this point were very different to the Maglanes at Goff's Cave. They were eating fish, they were eating cereals. When we run the same analyses on these dogs at this Pinnabashi site, this Turkish site,

• 31:30Speaker 03

  we find that both humans and dogs have elevated nitrogen values indicating they were eating fish. So whilst at Goff's Cave it's trickier to say that, at Pinnabashi, this other site where we found another very, very, very old dog, it is almost certainly that these dogs were being either directly or indirectly given fish to eat by the humans. And these are not big fish, these are small little sort of roaches, minnow type things which you find all across the site. So yeah, as Angela says, almost certainly a possibility of how we're being fed either directly or indirectly.

• 32:09Tristan Hughes?

  But that is amazing. That's one of the things that makes this research no doubt why it's so popular when you guys announced it to the world. This relatable nature of it, the fact that we're going back to the Ice Age, we're talking about dogs, we're talking about a community feeding their dog as well. And it's not just this idea of an ancient prehistoric dog being used for a practical purpose, for hunting, to benefit the community. The fact that we're getting insights into that kind of close bonded nature that so many of us still have with dogs today.

• 32:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, I agree. They probably were being used for hunting or centuries, almost certainly, but they were not completely easteritarian. There is a symbolic relationship here, which we get from the Ice Topes, but also this other sort of. Post-mortem relationship you see between the dogs at Goff's Cave and the humans at Goff's Cave. As we, as Selena said earlier, we have this post-mortem modification of human remains. We also find that on the dog as well.

• 33:12Tristan Hughes?

  You guys are so great at teeing up what I was about to ask next. So yes, what happened to this dog?

• 33:18Speaker 02

  Okay, well, obviously we don't know exactly what happened to this dog. This dog died. It is quite likely that this dog would have been used by the humans in life and in death. So it's possible that this dog would have been eaten by the humans. It would have been, had a nutritional function for them. This is the Paleolithic after all. You have to make use of the resources that you have, but there is more. It isn't just basic nutritional requirement associated with this dog. Because we also see these post-mortem modifications. There's aspects of this mandible that were treated after the animal had died by the, the humans, well, would assume that, that they're human companions.

• 34:01Speaker 02

  And this is that they actually make a hole in the mandible. And this is important. Why waste time, energy doing this if this animal to you did not have some significance? They make a perforation in it for what? We don't know for sure. One can imagine lots of different ways they may have used that or why. But the fact is that they actually do something with these remains more akin to a ritual modification. Rather than it being a basic nutritional requirement for food. And that is, I think, what sets apart this bone and the dog to the other animal remains at the site.

• 34:36Speaker 03

  Definitely. And we actually also see very similar treatments at this Turkish site I mentioned previously. So the humans are completely different. Rather than eating their dead, they do something which in our minds is probably far more sensible. They bury their dead. But alongside these human burials, you actually find dog burials as well. So at Goff's Cave and at Pinabashi, you've got two completely different human groups behaving very, very differently, but they appear to be treating their dogs in the same manner, same symbolic manner at each site, dependent on whichever culture they're with. And alongside this as well, so, once we'd done the DNA analysis of this individual from

• 35:16Speaker 03

  Goff's Cave and also at Pinabashi, it's sort of, and I hate using one of my close collaborators' phrases here, but it was essentially the Rosetta Stone. It allowed us to look back at other samples for which we had very, very poor DNA preservation for, and see, okay, now we have a dog from Goff's Cave, now we have a dog from Pinabashi. Is there anything that these data can tell us about other potential dogs in the region? And the answer was, well, we've actually been able to identify three other dogs in Central Europe, and one of them in particular, from a site called Bonn Oberkassel in Germany, was found, again, a sort of semi-skeleton, there's a mandible, there's a few long bones,

• 35:57Speaker 03

  but it was found alongside a burial of two individuals, dated around 15,000 years ago, and it has on its mandible some pathologies which have seemingly been able to heal. And the only way they would have been able to heal is through care, and that care, we interpret as being almost certainly given by humans. So again, it's this close interaction between humans and dogs, which we see, Goff's Cave has essentially unlocked loads of other insights which we can have about the dog-human relationship.

• 36:34Tristan Hughes?

  Because before this research, what was the earliest known concrete evidence for dogs in Western Eurasia? Did it actually span as far back as the Paleolithic, as the Ice Age?

• 36:43Speaker 03

  So, it's very, this is very tricky. As I said earlier, there's been loads of claims, but earliest genetic evidence we have for dogs anywhere before this study was 11,000 years ago. And this was in Northern Europe, Sweden, Russia, actually more sort of Western Russia.

• 37:02Speaker 03

  Dog at Bonneba Castle, although we have very, very poor DNA preservation in it, because of its association with this human burial, because of these pathologies, it was widely seen as the earliest dog, although genetically, we had no understanding of it. We didn't know whether it was a dog or wolf. Misanalysis has allowed us to confirm, yes, it is indeed a dog. And we found other ones.

• 37:31Speaker 04

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• 38:15Speaker 04

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• 38:34Tristan Hughes?

  Going back to the evidence of post-mortem modification on the mandible that survives. Selena, I guess that very much aligns with what you mentioned earlier about the human remains. There was that one which has the zigzags on it as well. So there is some, clearly on this mandible, dare I use the word art, or something like that, some creations on the bone after death that leave a lasting mark on the remains of this dog.

• 39:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, so with the human remains on the on the arm bone where we have the zigzag, I think, you know, that you can see as being a a artistic, you know, that that's, I think both are creative. But, you know, the arm bone one can be seen as being artistic and the and on the dog bone is definitely modified for a purpose. It's modified, it's creative, it's showing that there is this connection even after death and that it has more purpose to it. So, yeah, I think to me, to me, anyway, it attests to that that strong bond between human and dog.

• 39:41Speaker 03

  But and it also makes you think, why did they do it? Why did they make this hole in the mandible? Could have Fred have been strung through it and would it was it being used as something? I don't know. I my brain doesn't allow me to think that way. There's some anthropologists and archaeologists out there who will almost certainly have better insights than I have. But is in it's there's no reason to have really have done it. It must have been symbolic.

• 40:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:03Tristan Hughes?

  I mean, well, yes, is it not too far fetched to say necklace? Could this have been a very morbid necklace?

• 40:08Speaker 02

  I really want it to be a necklace. I really want it to be a necklace.

• 40:13Tristan Hughes?

  Selena, this is such a cool discovery and it sounds like there will be more information coming to light around it in the future. What has this new discovery at Goffs Cave? What would you say it's revealed? What new evidence, what new information has it revealed about people coming back to Britain at the end of the Ice Age, some fifteen thousand years ago? What new information has it revealed?

• 40:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it's not just revealing information about the the dogs, but it's also revealing about people as well. I mean, yes, so it pushes back this earliest genetic evidence for domesticated dog by more than five thousand years, as we mentioned. But it is really intriguing, this aspect of these different people, these different cultures who had dogs. So Williams mentioned that we have these different groups. We have these Magdalene people, these Magdalene culture at Goffs Cave, and then we have the Epigrevetian culture, a different group of people at Pino Bashi Cave in Turkey. We have these different groups. We have these culturally different people, the Magdalenians

• 41:20Speaker 02

  at Goss Cave, and then we have the Anatolian hunter-gatherers at the Pinobashi Cave in Turkey. So these two culturally different groups are culturally different. They have different burial practices. They have some different diets. We've said we have the fish diet evidenced at the cave, whereas we have a more faunal diet evidenced from Goss Cave. But they're also genetically distinct. These people actually genetically look different and culturally look different. And yet, they both have dogs. And then when we look at the genetics of these dogs, these dogs are actually pretty

• 42:00Speaker 02

  similar genetically to each other. So what this would seem to show is that even though these people aren't exchanging, they're not interbreeding, they're not exchanging cultural goods and ideas, they are exchanging these dogs, or these dogs are moving between them, or there is the connection between the dogs. It's kind of tantalising to think that these dogs are the thing that starts to unite people. I mean, again, that's me like kind of imagining things and thinking of this in a kind of a future way. But, you know, what is true for absolute is that these groups are very culturally different, genetically different, but the dogs are very similar. So something is

• 42:41Speaker 02

  happening here where they are exchanging the dogs, or these dogs are actually moving between them. There is a closeness there, and this could be the thing that is binding them, which is a fascinating thought.

• 42:51Speaker 03

  It is remarkable that these two sites, three and a half thousand kilometres apart, two and a half thousand miles, have humans. There's no evidence of any interaction between the humans. They're completely different, different area, different genetically, but they have exactly the same dogs. And we were looking at how to actually, that was a big question for about a month, how on earth did they get there? And what we're thinking now is that this sort of third culture, the Epri-Gavettian, who we find in the Balkan region, an Italian region, they begin to spread northwards after the Magellanians have spread.

• 43:26Speaker 03

  You see evidence of dogs with this group, this Epigaretian group, at sites in Italy, Switzerland and Germany. You actually see the Epigaretian coming into the UK at about fourteen thousand years ago, fourteen, fourteen thousand years ago. So the Goss Cave is really the example of a last Magdalanian assemblage in the UK. And then after that, the Epigaretian ancestry and Liphic culture and their culture spreads across the UK. And it was this expansion, which starts around sixteen thousand years ago, which we believe perhaps spread these dogs across a region. Because although at Goss Cave, we don't see any evidence of the Epigaretian, at Pidabasha, in the Anatolian

• 44:11Speaker 03

  hunter-gatherers, they show evidence of gene flow between the humans. So there is evidence of connectivity between Epigaretian culture and the Anatolian hunter-gatherer culture. Goss Cave is a little bit more complicated, but the fact that we have Epigaretians eight hundred years later in the UK makes me think that the dogs were being spread by these Epigaretians and that somehow these Magdalanians got these dogs. How they did that, again, that's one free anthropologist, but we almost certainly think that, yeah, that's our current best working hypothesis.

• 44:39Tristan Hughes?

  It's so interesting, isn't it? I mean, as a Joe Blogs, listening in to you guys, does it, do we get a sense then that more than fifteen thousand years ago, that an already domesticated line of dogs were coming west into Western Eurasia and then, you know, kind of spreading far and wide. So ultimately, you get certain domestic dogs in that site in Turkey. But ultimately, you also fifteen thousand years ago, you get similar, a similar type of domestic dog in the UK as well. Is that the information we can start to glean, William?

• 45:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, that is exactly the sort of information we can start to glean. And I think what is interesting is the fact that these cultures almost certainly didn't have dogs beforehand. But they've obviously seen the utility of these dogs. And then they've incorporated them into their cultural behaviour. Whereas in sort of later periods, the Mesolithic, the Neolithic, when a dog moves, or when a human moves, a dog moves. Yeah, so you could, it's actually quite easy to track population movements of humans via dog genomes. They're both sort of quite well correlated. If you see a dog with this ancestry pattern, you're going to see a human with this ancestry pattern. Whereas in a Paleolithic, we don't see that. We see the same dogs across completely different human groups. And it's

• 45:55Speaker 03

  how that radiation happened. We think it's the Epic Etean. We still are sort of pretty uncertain about it, to be honest. But it appears that dogs have spread due to their utility. Most certainly due to their utility. Which is fascinating.

• 46:08Tristan Hughes?

  Do you think there is likelihood that further Ice Age Canid remains that may have already been discovered from Goff's Cave or elsewhere will prove with the new technology will prove to also be a domestic dog? Do you think we'll have further examples of dogs from Ice Age Britain coming to light in the future?

• 46:29Speaker 02

  Yes, I do believe so. Or I hope so, anyway.

• 46:32Speaker 03

  I agree.

• 46:33Tristan Hughes?

  That's very exciting. Do you think it will be just be from Goff's Cave? Or could you see us? Are there other very good late Ice Age Britain sites coming to light now? We've got humans, we've got animal remains that might also reveal more information?

• 46:47Speaker 03

  There are. This is, this, we are working on this, let's just say. We are working on this. And not, not just for UK as well. We're looking.

• 46:53Speaker 02

  More to come, Tristan, more to come. You'll be inviting us back again, we hope.

• 46:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, let's hope, let's hope.

• 46:59Tristan Hughes?

  Okay. William, what you were saying about dogs coming into Western Eurasia from the East, does this very much align with this idea, I know it must be still murky waters, that when dogs are domesticated from wolves, it doesn't happen in what we now say is Europe. It happens further east, and then you've already got domestic dogs coming west.

• 47:21Speaker 03

  It's tricky, it's tricky. So I think, maybe I misspoke, but I was thinking more of the Epic Eteans in the Balkan Italy region had the dogs, had these dogs post Ice Age and then spread, rather than being from a Near East. But in terms of how, where and when dogs themselves became domesticated, we thought, when I first had the epiphany that we'd got a dog here, I really did think we'd be able to answer the question of where were these dogs domesticated? We, it hasn't really told us anything like that. Our whole paper's gone a completely different way compared to what it could have been, which is origins of dog domestication.

• 47:59Speaker 03

  And I think the, the best way to, to answer this question is just by heavily sampling more canids from a pre L G M period, which is almost certainly when dogs became domesticated, to try to pinpoint the sort of, the link between the grey wolf population, which became domesticated, and the dog population, which we have domesticated. And there are loads of sort of theories about how this might have occurred. You've got the L G M, so you've got the ice sheets on the, in northern latitudes. Very likely human populations, or human populations did migrate southwards. Cat, grey wolf populations would have migrated southwards into these refugia. Grey wolf population in very, very close interaction with the human population.

• 48:40Speaker 03

  That is probably the process of, of how dogs and wool, or how dogs became out of wolves with that interaction between initially wild wolves and humans and very, very strong selective pressures, which would have been experienced by our wolf population, which then sort of leaves them, become dogs. But we don't know where it happened. Definitely Eurasia, but west, east, don't know. There's loads of like theories and, yeah.

• 49:03Speaker 02

  I'd just add to that, that just saying, if we think about the fact that we see that dogs and wolves are already so genetically distinct by fifteen thousand years, and they are so widespread across Europe. As we've said, we've found these dogs now all across Europe. They're widespread, they're very different. So clearly the actual domestication process must have happened quite a while before then. That's, that's just what I would add to that.

• 49:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, exa- exactly. And you can, you can sort of predict the divergence of a population of genetic data, from modern genetic data, and can very strongly predict it was between forty and twenty thousand years ago, which isn't that precise, to be honest. I'd say many studies have come out saying, okay, it must have been a hundred thousand years ago, eighty thousand years ago. But now with the latest data, it's between forty and twenty, it still isn't particularly precise. But in terms of the archaeology and the sort of climate of the, of the, of the time, that is when the climate was beginning to worsen, glacial maximum type thing. So then you're, you're beginning to see populations behaving in perhaps different manners to they were fifty thousand.

• 50:04Speaker 02

  It's actually a very informative time point, really.

• 50:07Speaker 03

  It probably is a time point where not only was probably the most important, the dog domestication, but also human cultural evolution is probably the most important time period for that, pre Neolithic.

• 50:17Tristan Hughes?

  Selena, William, this is a really exciting time and it sounds like there's more exciting information that will be coming to light around Britain's oldest dog, around dogs in Ice Age Britain and Europe in the future. Good luck with all the research. Hope to get you back on the show when that information comes to light. And it just goes to me to say thank you so much to you both for coming on the show.

• 50:40Speaker 02

  Tristan, always a pleasure to be here. Thank you so much for having us.

• 50:44Speaker 03

  Yes, an absolute pleasure and we will be seeing you again, no doubt.

• 50:51Tristan Hughes?

  Well, there you go. There was Dr William Marsh and Dr Selina Brace talking through this brand new research. This exciting new discovery that Britain's first known dog goes back to the Ice Age, some 15,000 years old. Really exciting time for those studying Ice Age remains and early human remains with the new developments in science. That means that more and more discoveries are going to be revealed in the years ahead. We know how much you love it when we explore the deep past, the Ice Age, human evolution and so on. So don't you worry, we'll be doing more episodes similar to this in the future. I hope you enjoyed it. Thank you so much for listening. Now, if you're enjoying The Ancients, please make sure to follow the show on Spotify or

• 51:35Tristan Hughes?

  wherever you get your podcasts. That really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favour. If you'd also be kind enough to leave us a rating as well, well, we would really appreciate that. That really does help us as we continue our mission as always, to share these amazing stories from our distant past with you and with as many people as possible. You can also sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a new release every week. Sign up at historyhit.com/subscribe. That's all from me. I'll see you in the next episode.

• 52:36Tristan Hughes?

  The.