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Scientists may have found the world’s ‘oldest dog’ – an 18,000-year-old puppy, that was discovered frozen in ice in Sweden.
Discovered in the Siberian permafrost last year, the scientists shared that puppy was ‘surprisingly well-preserved’. However, scientists and researchers Love Dalen and Dave Stanton can still not determine if the puppy–being called Dogor–was a wolf or dog pup.
Stanton added that the study of such a rare specimen could prove to be critical in understanding the evolution and subsequent domestication of dogs.
It seems that dogs were domesticated from a lineage of wolves that went extinct. So that’s why it’s such a difficult problem to work on to understand where and when dogs were domesticated. If you want to find the answer to that you need to look at ancient samples because the population they were domesticated from doesn’t appear to be around anymore. It’s specimens like this that could help clear that up but we don’t have the results yet to speculate on that.
Despite being thousands of years old, the puppy still had his fur intact, along with a full set of teeth.
It just goes to show that despite all our scientific advancements, nature still remains a mystery to us.
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