JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
For years, scientists could only genetically prove that the first dogs existed about 10,000 years ago, but perhaps they were just barking up the wrong prehistoric tree.
ANDERS BERGSTROM: We have confident genetic identification of dogs that lived at least 14,000 years ago in Europe.
SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
Anders Bergstrom is a researcher at the University of East Anglia. He is the author of a new study all about ancient dogs that lived alongside early humans in what's now Europe.
SUMMERS: We knew that dogs are most closely related to ancient wolves, but when man's best friend actually became friendly to man, that's a different question. The study confirms that the earliest domesticated dogs predate even agriculture.
DETROW: Who's a good paleolithic boy?
BERGSTROM: So several thousand years before farmers moved into Europe, there were dogs living with the hunter-gatherer people of Europe. But their identity has remained kind of elusive.
DETROW: Bergstrom and his team extracted bone samples from hundreds of dog-like remains across Europe and looked at their DNA.
BERGSTROM: So we perhaps expected to find only dogs, but we found a few wolves mixed in.
DETROW: That analysis also showed something else.
BERGSTROM: These earliest dogs in Europe - they share an origin with other dogs in Asia and in the rest of the world.
SUMMERS: Previously, scientists hypothesized that European dogs were domesticated independently from those in other parts of the world. But the dogs in this study were found to share common ancestry with later dogs around the world, and about half the modern popular breeds in Europe have ancestors going back before humans started large-scale farming.
BERGSTROM: So that's quite substantial proportion of present-day European dog ancestry that we can trace back to what is essentially the last ice age.
DETROW: Scientists are not quite sure what these ice age puppies might have looked like.
BERGSTROM: We know, generally speaking, that quite early on, dogs are smaller than wolves - a little bit smaller - but that's about it.
DETROW: Bergstrom says his findings have made him look a little bit differently at dogs he sees today when they're walking down the street.
BERGSTROM: Perhaps 20,000 years ago, their ancestor was a wolf that looked extremely different. And it's just remarkable how much dogs have changed since domestication, as humans have bred for specific traits. It's a testament to the power of evolution, in a way. I mean, it's human-driven, but it's still an evolutionary process by which these dogs change genetically over time.
DETROW: And now we have the DNA to prove that these changes started thousands of years earlier than we once thought.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE PARTY INSTRUMENTALISTS' "WHO LET THE DOGS OUT (INSTRUMENTAL)") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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