New Zealand researcher Dr Lachie Scarsbrook has made his largest scientific finding to date - that dogs existed nearly 16,000 years ago.
That's 5000 years earlier than previously known.
The study involved 17 institutions in Europe and is the most significant finding into the origin of dogs in at least 10 years, Dr Scarsbrook told 1News.
"It's been a very long journey... Working on all these kinds of projects around dogs, I've worked on dingos, German Shepherds but this kind of had a special place cause it's the biggest discovery of anything in dog research in the past 10, 20 years, figuring out how long they've been at our sides."
"Up until now the earliest dog we had was 11,000 years old... we've pushed that back by 5000 years which is no mean feat... that's a massive gap."
Dr Scarsbrook is from Kaikōura and previously studied at the University of Otago.
He received a scholarship to further his studies at the University of Oxford from 2021 and is now a research fellow at the globally top-ranked university in England.
"It's definitely not a project I could have got involved in back at home and it's nice being over here in Europe and connecting with all of these different research institutions from across the world and being able to do this ground-breaking research here at the University of Oxford."
He also spends time in Germany where he's a researcher at Ludwig Maximillian University of Munich.
'Dogs were widely distributed across Western Eurasia during the Palaeolithic' has been published in the world-leading Nature science journal with Dr Scarsbrook a co-first author.
Dogs evolved from grey wolf populations but you can't tell the difference between the skeletons of the earliest dogs and wolves. Earlier studies have relied on short DNA sequences and skeletal measurements but the new study is based on genomes, the DNA blueprint of an organism found in a cell.
It was unclear whether the ancient bones found in Pınarbaşı in Türkiye and Gough’s Cave in England would retain enough genetic information to be useful, but genomes were able to be recovered.
"The fact that we managed to get DNA from these bones that are 16,000 years old (Türkiye bones) I think is really remarkable."
The genomes were compared with those from more than 1000 modern and ancient dogs and wolves from across the world to determines the bones were those of dogs.
"These specimens allowed us to identify additional ancient dogs from sites in Germany, Italy and Switzerland, which clearly show that dogs were already widely dispersed across Europe and Türkiye by at-least 14,000 years ago," Natural History Museum co-first author Dr William Marsh said in a press release.
The study also suggested dogs were domesticated during the last Ice Age, more than 10,000 years before humans grew crops or kept any other animals.
The special and valuable relationship humans have had with dogs since then, as suggested by evidence in the study, is what Dr Scarsbrook finds particularly interesting.
"We've got evidence here that they were being fed by the humans at the site (Türkiye) and being cared for in the same way they care for people.
"These puppies were from a burial and they were buried in the same place of the site where humans were buried, so they almost had a personhood, they were being treated like people and given the same kind of funerary rights that people had."
He said that there was evidence that human practices were extended to dogs at the English site too.
He said humans lived hunter-gatherer lives and must have found dogs valuable despite being another mouth to feed.
"What we're thinking is maybe having a dog as an early alert system if another predator's nearby, they can bark and alert you and wake you up if a bear or a wolf is in town."
Another suggestion is the dogs provided warmth to humans living in harsh conditions at the end of the Ice Age.
"You could hug it while you're going to sleep in the same way people do today but this was kind of life or death situation."
"The roles that dogs have played for the last 16,000 years definitely mirror what they do today other than I guess wearing party hats and drinking dog matcha lattes."
The study found a DNA connection with the world's earliest dogs and the ancestors of dog breeds such as boxers and salukis.
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