The Twitter account WeRateDogs® has over 8.6 million followers. People follow so that anytime they open their feed there is a chance to see a cute puppy cover their phone screen. Most just can’t help but smile anytime they see a smiling ball of fur, but I doubt any of them would want to cuddle up with this 18,000-year-old dog found by Swedish researchers.
The ancient pup was found in a remote part of north-east Siberia back in the summer of 2018, and at first researchers weren’t sure whether or not the animal was a dog or a wolf. But after evaluation, it became clear that the ‘amazingly well-preserved’ animal was a dog.
Further testing also revealed that the male canine named ‘Dogor’ was around 18,000-years-old, making it one of the oldest confirmed dogs in world history.
We now have some news on the 18,000 year old #wolf or #dog puppy.
Genome analyses shows it’s a male. So we asked our Russian colleagues to name it…
Thus, the name of the puppy is Dogor!
Dogor is a Yakutian word for “friend”, which seems very suitable. pic.twitter.com/epIz8mEpVW— Centre for Palaeogenetics (@CpgSthlm) November 25, 2019
What an ugly little guy, huh? Kidding aside, this is such a cool find by these scientists. The fact that has all its teeth and feels like a ‘very recently dead animal’ is insane. It’s thousands of years old and the only real damage to the corpse is an exposed rib cage. Russian researcher Sergey Federov said it best when he said, “. . .this puppy has been lying underground in the same pose and condition for 18,000 years without being disturbed at all”.
It’s crazy how much humans can potentially learn from this one creature. Evolutionary genetics professor Love Dalén even says that Dogor could possibly teach us about when the process of canine domestication started. Pretty cool if you ask me, but I don’t know if it’s more interesting than this research done on the benefits of watching horror films.
Featured image via Twitter / @Rainmaker1973
