In the beginning, there was the dog

What would the world be like without music or rivers or the green and tender grass? What would this world be like without dogs?” Mary Oliver writes in Dog Songs. Science has now confirmed what the heart has always suspected: That the dog has been by man’s side long before the dawn of civilisation. The earliest genetic evidence of the existence of dogs, dating roughly to 15,800 years ago — more than 5,000 years earlier than previously believed — has come to light. Analysis of DNA from remains at sites in Britain, Serbia, Turkey has confirmed that these bones belonged not to wolves, not to liminal creatures hovering between wildness and domestication, but to dogs, already beloved, already companions to hunter-gatherers long before the evolution of agriculture.

The discovery, published in Nature, shows dogs were not only common across Europe and West Asia, but they were also genetically linked despite vast distances, suggesting they moved with humans. This indicates that domestication may have begun even earlier. What emerges is a richer picture of coevolution. At some sites, skeletal remains of pets were found buried alongside human remains; elsewhere, evidence suggests that in a world defined by precarity, dogs may have helped humans hunt and guard.

It is tempting to see this bond as sentimental, but, perhaps, it is better understood as formative. To love a dog is to practise, inadvertently, a steadier, kinder way of being — to give and receive love without expectation or grievance. Who has not known, in some dark hour, the soft percussion of paws drawing closer, the comfort of a warm, insistent nose gently nuzzling woes away? Perhaps the hunter-gatherers felt it too — how the steadfast loyalty softened the heart, settled the rough edges into something more patient, more present, and ultimately, more humane.