Zhokhov Island is in the East Siberian Arctic, and it’s a very interesting place not only from the standpoint of archeologists and cynologists, but to certain dog owners fascinated by the early (very early) history of their breeds.

In the 1990s, a Russian scientist, Vladimir Pitulko, studied archeological items that had been found at a hunting site on the island. The pieces included dog harnesses, sledges, and most interestingly, well preserved dog bones. Radiocarbon dating determined that the age of the items and bones was around 7,800 to 8,000 years old, and this made the find the first evidence of dogs having been used to transport goods. It also provided proof that on the coast of Northeast Asia, dogs were the first animal of any kind that man tamed, bred, and used for a utilitarian purpose.

A recent article in SCIENCE reports that a more updated analysis of the bones found them to be even older: 10,000 years old. This means that training dogs for practical use happened thousands of years earlier than had been appreciated.

To confirm that the bones did indeed belong to dogs, Pitulko compared two complete skulls with those of wolves and Siberian Huskies from the region. Two key ratios—snout height to skull length and cranium height to skull length—reliably distinguished the two, and using those measures, they knew that the bones were truly dogs (though one may have been wolf-dog hybrid).

The article referred to the dog bones found as the “Zhokhov dog,” and added that Zhokhov dog’s genome led researchers to conclude that it is directly related to the modern-day Siberian Husky, the Alaskan Malamute and Greenlandic sledge dog, breeds that have a common origin in Arctic Siberia.

You can read more about this and see photographs here.

Image by Ivan Kurmyshov/Dreamstime