Siberian hunter-gatherers may have bred canines for pulling sleds and hunting polar bears.
Last month I wrote about how studying dogs gives scientists a unique view into genetics because of the way they’ve been bred by humans. So who were the first people to breed dogs?
Recent evidence now points to the hunter-gatherers of a Siberian Island known as Zhokhov. Populated nine thousand years ago, these people lived in an unforgiving land, hunting polar bears and reindeer in year-round freezing temperatures.
An analysis of canine bones from Zhokhov suggests that these hunter-gatherers were among the first humans to breed dogs for a particular purpose—by thousands of years.
tags:
via Whisker Therapy