The world’s first pedigree dog breeders came 9,000 years before Crufts. They may have been Stone Age polar bear hunters who domesticated wolves on a Siberian island and bred them into smaller, husky-like canines, scientists say.
The people of Zhokhov lived by hunting bears, reindeer and other animals in areas inhabited by wolves. Now scientists have found evidence that they used the wolves to create the first known working breeds, producing a smaller dog to pull sledges in teams and a bigger dog for hunting bears.
“They were clearly shaping these animals to do something special,” said Vladimir Pitulko, an archaeologist at the Russian Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg, in an interview with Science, the academic journal.
He has been excavating Zhokhov since 1989 where he and his colleagues found canine and wolf skulls and other bones, plus the remains of wooden sledges.
To work out the provenance of the Zhokhov dogs, the team extrapolated their sizes from the fossil bones of 11 individuals. Ten of the dogs would have weighed 35lb-55lb and may have resembled Siberian huskies, the academics will reveal next month in the Journal of Archaeological Science.
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The remaining animal, a possible wolf-dog hybrid, weighed about 63lb and may have been similar to an Alaskan malamute.
Siberian wolves can weigh up to 130lb — too large to pull sledges because they would overheat. The ideal size for such a dog is about 50lb.
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