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Concept
Paleolithic dog
Summary
The Paleolithic dog was a Late Pleistocene canine. They were directly associated with human hunting camps in Europe over 30,000 years ago and it is proposed that these were domesticated. They are further proposed to be either a proto-dog and the ancestor of the domestic dog or an extinct, morphologically and genetically divergent wolf population.
One authority has classified the Paleolithic dog as Canis c.f. familiaris (where c.f. is a Latin term meaning uncertain, as in Canis believed to be familiaris). Previously in 1969, a study of ancient mammoth-bone dwellings at the Mezine paleolithic site in the Chernigov region, Ukraine uncovered 3 possibly domesticated "short-faced wolves". The specimens were classified as Canis lupus domesticus (domesticated wolf).
In 2002, a study looked at 2 fossil skulls of large canids dated at 16,945 years before present (YBP) that had been found buried 2 metres and 7 metres from what was once a mammoth-bone hut at the Upper Paleolithic site of Eliseevichi-1 in the Bryansk region of central Russia, and using an accepted morphologically based definition of domestication declared them to be "Ice Age dogs". In 2009, another study looked at these 2 early dog skulls in comparison to other much earlier but morphologically similar fossil skulls that had been found across Europe and concluded that the earlier specimens were "Paleolithic dogs", which were morphologically and genetically distinct from Pleistocene wolves that lived in Europe at that time.
The Paleolithic dog was smaller than the Pleistocene wolf (Canis c.f. lupus) and the extant grey wolf (Canis lupus), with a skull size that indicates a dog similar in size to the modern large dog breeds. The Paleolithic dog had a mean body mass of compared to Pleistocene wolf and recent European wolf .
The earliest sign of domestication in dogs was thought to be the neotenization of skull morphology and the shortening of snout length. This leads to tooth crowding, a reduction in tooth size and the number of teeth, which has been attributed to the strong selection for reduced aggression.
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