2026-03-25 ユニバーシティ・カレッジ・ロンドン（UCL）
14,300-year-old dog jawbone from Gough’s Cave, UK. Credit: © The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London
＜関連情報＞
- https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2026/mar/humans-kept-dogs-5000-years-earlier-thought
- https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10170-x
- https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10112-7
旧石器時代には、犬は西ユーラシア全域に広く分布していた Dogs were widely distributed across western Eurasia during the Palaeolithic
William A. Marsh,Lachie Scarsbrook,Eren Yüncü,Lizzie Hodgson,Audrey T. Lin,Maria De Iorio,Olaf Thalmann,Mark G. Thomas,Mahaut Goor,Anders Bergström,Angela Noseda,Sarieh Amiri,Fereidoun Biglari,Dušan Borić,Katia Bougiouri,Alberto Carmagnini,Maddalena Giannì,Tom Higham,Ophelie Lebrasseur,Anna Linderholm,Marcello A. Mannino,Caroline Middleton,Gökhan Mustafaoğlu,Angela Perri,… Laurent A. F. Frantz
Nature Published:25 March 2026
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10170-x
Abstract
Archaeological evidence suggests that dogs diverged from wolves during the Palaeolithic, more than 15,000 years ago1,2,3,4,5,6,7. The earliest unequivocal genetic evidence, however, is associated with dog remains from Mesolithic archaeological contexts approximately 10,900 years ago8,9. Here we generate both nuclear and mitochondrial genomes from canid remains at Pınarbaşı in Türkiye (15,800 years ago)10 and Gough’s Cave in the UK (14,300 years ago)11, as well as from dogs excavated from two Mesolithic sites in Serbia (Padina between 11,500–7,900 years ago and Vlasac 8,900 years ago)12,13. Our analyses indicate that a genetically homogeneous dog population was already widely distributed across Europe and Anatolia during the Late Upper Palaeolithic (by at least 14,300 years ago). This finding suggests that dogs were exchanged among genetically and culturally distinct western Eurasian Late Palaeolithic human populations, namely the Magdalenian, Epigravettian and Anatolian hunter-gatherers10,14,15,16. Last, we identify a major influx of eastern Eurasian dog ancestry during the Mesolithic, concomitant with the movement of eastern hunter-gatherer populations into Europe14, which led to the establishment of the primary ancestry characteristics that define European dog populations today.
ヨーロッパにおける初期の犬のゲノム史 Genomic history of early dogs in Europe
Anders Bergström,Anja Furtwängler,Sarah Johnston,Erika Rosengren,Abagail Breidenstein,Thomas Booth,Jesse B. McCabe,Jessica Peto,Mia Williams,Monica Kelly,Frankie Tait,Chris Baumann,Rita Radzeviciute,Christopher Barrington,Kyriaki Anastasiadou,Alexandre Gilardet,Isabelle Glocke,Mattias Sherman,Anastasia Brativnyk,Alexander Herbig,Kay Prüfer,Saskia Pfrengle,Joscha Gretzinger,Tatiana R. Feuerborn,… Pontus Skoglund
Nature Published:25 March 2026
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10170-x
Abstract
The earliest morphologically identifiable dogs are from Europe and date to at least 14,000 years ago1,2,3,4,5, although early remains are also found in other regions. The origin of early dogs in Europe, and their relationships to other dogs, has remained elusive in the absence of genome-wide data. Similarly, although dogs were the only domestic animal to predate agriculture, little is known about how the arrival of Neolithic farmers from Southwest Asia affected the dogs living with European Mesolithic hunter-gatherers. Here we analysed 216 canid remains, including 181 from Palaeolithic and Mesolithic Europe. We developed a genome-wide capture approach that enriched endogenous DNA by 10–100-fold and could distinguish dog from wolf ancestry for 141 of 216 remains. The oldest dog data that we recovered are from a 14,200-year-old dog from the Kesslerloch site in Switzerland, and we find that it shares ancestry with later worldwide dogs—inconsistent with the hypothesis that European Upper Palaeolithic dogs derived wholly from a separate domestication process. The Kesslerloch dog already displays more affinity to Mesolithic, Neolithic and present-day European dogs than to Asian dogs, demonstrating that dog genetic diversification had started well before 14,200 years ago. We find a Neolithic influx of Southwest Asian ancestry into Europe, but this seems to have been of smaller magnitude than in humans, suggesting that Mesolithic dogs contributed substantially to Neolithic, and, ultimately, probably also modern, European dogs.
