Paleolithic dog
| The Upper Paleolithic |
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|---|---|
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Upper Paleolithic (40–10 ka)
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| ↓ Mesolithic ↓ Stone Age |
The Paleolithic dog was a canine. They were directly associated with human hunting camps in Europe over 30,000 years before present (YBP) and it is proposed that they were domesticated. They are also proposed to be either a proto-dog and the ancestor of the domestic dog or an extinct morphologically and genetically divergent wolf population.
A study has classified the Paleolithic dog as Canis c.f. familiaris where c.f. is used in Latin to mean confer, uncertain (Canis believed to be familiaris). Previously in 1969, a study of ancient mammoth-bone dwellings at the Mezine paleolithic site in the Chernigov region, Ukraine uncovered 3 possibly domesticated "short-faced wolves". The specimens were given the name Canis lupus domesticus (domesticated wolf).
In 2002, a study looked at 2 fossil skulls of large canids dated at 16,945 YBP that had been found buried 2 metres and 7 metres from what was once a mammoth-bone hut at the Upper Paleolithic site of Eliseevichi-1 in the Bryansk region of central Russia, and using an accepted morphologically-based definition of domestication declared them to be "Ice Age dogs". In 2009, another study looked at these 2 early dog skulls in comparison to other much earlier but morphologically similar fossil skulls that had been found across Europe and concluded that the earlier specimens were "Palaeolithic dogs", which were morphologically and genetically distinct from Pleistocene wolves that lived in Europe at that time.
The Paleolithic dog was smaller than the Pleistocene wolf (Canis c.f. lupus) and the extant gray wolf (Canis lupus), with a skull size that indicated a dog similar in size to the modern large dog breeds. The Paleolithic dog had a mean body mass of 36–37 kg compared to Pleistocene wolf 42–44 kg and recent European wolf 41–42 kg.
The earliest sign of domestication in dogs was thought to be the neotonization of skull morphology and the shortening of snout length that results in tooth crowding, reduction in tooth size, and a reduction in the number of teeth, which has been attributed to the strong selection for reduced aggression.
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