Dogs: (Prehistoric) Man's Best Friend | National Geographic

There are more dog burials in prehistory than there are burials of any other animals, including cats, for example, or horses. Dogs seem to have a very special place in human communities in the past. As soon as we see in the archaeological record skeletal remains that look like a modern dog, we see dogs being buried. I mean, 14,000 years ago we see the first dog burials appear.

I started about 12 or 13 years ago doing archaeology in Siberia around Lake Baikal as part of a long-standing archaeological project that's centered here at the University of Alberta. The dogs were being treated just like people when they died. They were being carefully placed in a grave. Some of them are wearing necklaces when they're buried; some they play spoons and other offerings in the grave with the dog, with the idea, I think, being essentially for some of them that they had souls. They had an afterlife, and people loved them, so they treated them like human persons when they passed away.

One of the things we're doing here in this laboratory is we're studying the diets of dogs in the past. We do this by looking at chemical components of the bone. The big question in dog domestication research has been where and when did dogs emerge from wolves. But I don't think it really tells us very much. I'm more interested in what can we learn about people's relationships with dogs in the past and learn more about our own relationships with dogs.

What was its life like? And that's more interesting to me. Was it accompanying people in hunting? Was it carrying packs? Was it loved or was it abused? These are interesting questions, I think, more interesting than just when.