On Mar. 24, 2026, researchers at the Francis Crick Institute report that the largest ancient DNA study of canid remains to date sheds light on how the first farmers adopted hunter-gatherer dogs and highlights that dog domestication happened before 14,000 years ago.

Recent estimates suggest that the UK is home to nearly 13 million pet dogs – about one in three households. Dogs have been ‘man’s best friend’ throughout living history, but when did we first adopt these furry companions, and how have they evolved since then?

Pontus and Anders Bergström, Lecturer at the University of East Anglia and former postdoc at the Crick, deployed advanced genetic techniques to distinguish dogs from their wild cousins, in research published in Nature. 

Working with researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and a large network of international collaborators, Pontus and Anders analysed DNA from 216 canid skeletal remains, including 181 pre-Neolithic samples (before approx. 10,000 years ago), before the invention of farming. These samples came from sites across Europe and its vicinity, including Switzerland, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Turkey, Sweden, Denmark and Scotland.

“Due to the age of the dogs studied, and the large amount of contamination from microbes, the amount of canid DNA in most of the samples was low,” says Anders. “We used a technique called ‘hybridisation capture’ to boost the amount of usable DNA. This involved identifying genetic variants that are present in current-day grey wolves and ‘‘fishing’ only these out of the ancient canid samples.”

The really exciting finding was that a proposed dog from the Kesslerloch cave in Switzerland was genetically a dog: at 14,200 years old, it’s one of the oldest European dogs confirmed by genetics. It joins a 15,800-year-old dog from Türkiye, analysed as part of a related study into the earliest genetic evidence for domesticated dogs in Türkiye and Europe, also published in Nature and led by the Natural History Museum, the University of Oxford and LMU Munich.

“The last estimated ‘oldest dog’ DNA is 10,900 years old; now the horizon is much further back into the past,” says Pontus.