“Rediscovered After Millennia: The Astonishing Secrets of Dogor, Ancient Wolf-Dog Survivor of a Frozen Era”
Researchers from Sweden’s Centre for Palaeogenetics (SCP) took a sample of the animal’s rib bone and used carbon dating to determine that it had been buried underneath the frozen tundra for roughly 18,000 years. They were also able to establish that the animal was a male.
The team named the frozen pup Dogor, a Yakutian word that translates to mean “friend.” But was Dogor really man’s best friend or was he still a wild animal? Researchers aren’t quite sure: a genome sequencing on the puppy’s DNA revealed something astonishing — researchers couldn’t determine whether the puppy was a dog or a wolf.
In past discoveries of similar canine corpses, it’s usually very easy to find out which side of the canine line of evolution the animal falls on. Dogor, however, is different. The anomaly could mean that the puppy came from “a very interesting time in terms of wolf and dog evolution.”
“We don’t know exactly when dogs were domesticated, but it may have been from about that time,” SCP researcher David Stanton told CNN. “We are interested in whether it is in fact a dog or a wolf, or perhaps it’s something halfway between the two.”
Stanton added that the well-preserved body has supplied researchers with enough material to work on but they will need to run more tests to figure out where exactly Dogor belongs in the canine evolution timeline.
“We have a lot of data from it already, and with that amount of data, you’d expect to tell if it was one or the other. The fact that we can’t might suggest that it’s from a population that was ancestral to both — to dogs and wolves,” Stanton said.
