The oldest verified evidence of the emotional bond between humans and dogs is the small skeleton of a puppy that would have died in a matter of days if the Ice Age hunter-gatherers who buried it had not spent approximately six weeks nursing it back to health. The specific evidence for the nursing care, extracted from the puppy’s teeth by a Leiden University veterinarian and PhD candidate named Luc Janssens and an international team of collaborators working on the reunited Bonn-Oberkassel remains 104 years after their original 1914 discovery — using dental-paleopathology frameworks developed by Frank Verstraete’s UC Davis veterinary dentistry group and cited throughout the paper — is one of the more substantive single archaeological findings in the recorded modern history of the study of prehistoric human-animal relationships. Janssens’s team, examining the puppy’s mandible under high-resolution imaging, identified three distinct paleopathological signatures: enamel hypoplasia (bands of underdeveloped enamel visible on the puppy’s molars, characteristic of a period of substantial developmental disruption during tooth formation), severe periodontal disease, and an atypical abrasion pattern on the mandible itself. The combination is diagnostic of a specific pathology: infection with the canine morbillivirus, more commonly known as canine distemper.
According to Janssens and colleagues’ 2018 paper in the Journal of Archaeological Science on the Bonn-Oberkassel dog’s paleopathology, the puppy contracted canine distemper at approximately 19 weeks of age, developed the severe secondary complications the disease characteristically produces (respiratory infection, gastrointestinal disruption, high fever, progressive neurological symptoms including motor coordination loss), and continued exhibiting the pathology visible on its teeth for approximately six weeks before dying at the age of approximately 27-28 weeks. The substantive point that the Janssens paper made — and that has, in the subsequent seven years, substantially reshaped the broader academic understanding of prehistoric human-dog relationships — is that a young dog with canine distemper in the Ice Age European wilderness would not have survived six weeks without human intervention. Untreated canine distemper produces mortality rates of approximately 80-90 percent in wild canid populations. The disease, in its acute phase, essentially incapacitates the animal: it cannot hunt, cannot forage, cannot maintain body temperature without assistance, cannot reliably keep down food or water, cannot defend itself against predators. A puppy with active distemper needs, to survive, essentially continuous care: regular cleaning of respiratory and gastrointestinal discharges, hand-feeding of soft food, provision of warm and clean shelter, protection from environmental exposure, and manual assistance with the basic bodily functions the disease progressively impairs.
What the nursing meant
The specific implication of the six-week survival period is that the Bonn-Oberkassel puppy received exactly this level of care from the human family that had adopted it. As reported in Smithsonian Magazine’s 2018 coverage of the Janssens palaeopathological analysis, the substantive novelty of the finding is not merely that Palaeolithic humans kept dogs — the presence of domesticated dogs in the Magdalenian archaeological record has been established for approximately 40 years. The novelty is that the specific nature of the care given to this specific puppy substantially precludes the utilitarian explanations that have historically dominated academic discussion of prehistoric dog-human relationships. A gravely ill 20-week-old puppy is not a useful hunting animal. It is not a useful guard animal. It is not, in fact, useful for anything. It requires substantial expenditure of human time, human food, and human warmth without producing any measurable return. That the Ice Age family that owned this puppy nonetheless provided this care — for six weeks, until the puppy died despite their efforts — indicates that they were operating on the basis of some substantive attachment to the animal that was not primarily instrumental. The care was, in essential respects, the same kind of care that a family gives to a sick child rather than the kind of care that a farmer gives to a productive animal.
The subsequent burial reinforced the interpretation. Per National Geographic’s coverage of the Bonn-Oberkassel palaeopathological findings and their broader implications for the understanding of prehistoric human-animal bonding, when the puppy eventually died — of what exact cause remains unclear, whether from continuing effects of the distemper infection or from a secondary complication or from natural juvenile mortality unrelated to the illness — the humans in whose care it had been kept did not dispose of the small body in the way that Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers would ordinarily have disposed of any dead animal. They incorporated the puppy into a formal human burial. The specific grave containing the puppy also contained two adult humans — a man in his 40s and a woman in her 20s, whose relationship to each other and to the puppy is unknown but whose burial together suggests some form of family unit — and a substantial set of grave goods that would have taken meaningful human labour to produce: a decorated bone hairpin, a bear-penis bone marked with red ochre, a small carved elk-antler sculpture, and a red deer incisor. A subsequent re-examination of the site inventory in 2018 identified a second dog tooth — from an older, smaller individual — that appears to have been deliberately placed in the grave as a further grave good.
What 14,200 years actually is
The 14,223 ± 58 year radiocarbon date established for the Bonn-Oberkassel burial places it, in the specific chronology of European prehistory, at the beginning of the Late Glacial Interstadial (Bølling-Allerød) — the warming that would eventually give way to the Younger Dryas cold snap approximately 1,800 years later, and that marked the substantial retreat of the Pleistocene glaciation from central Europe. The human occupants of the grave belonged to the Magdalenian culture, the late-Upper-Palaeolithic hunter-gatherer tradition responsible for the cave paintings at Lascaux and Altamira, whose members had spent the preceding centuries adapting to a rapidly warming European environment in which the mammoth-steppe ecosystem was giving way to the mixed conifer-broadleaf forests that would eventually cover the Holocene European landmass. As detailed in the UCL Human Evolution archive’s summary of the Bonn-Oberkassel re-examination, the Bonn-Oberkassel dog is currently the oldest verified example of a domestic dog buried alongside humans in the recorded history of European archaeology. Other Late Palaeolithic dogs are known from approximately contemporaneous or slightly earlier contexts — including the Tumat Puppies of Siberia, dated to approximately 14,046-14,965 years before present — but no other prehistoric dog burial known has produced the specific paleopathological evidence of prolonged nursing care that the Bonn-Oberkassel specimen has. Whatever precisely happened at Bonn-Oberkassel in the winter of 14,223 years ago — a family taking in a sick puppy, watching it fail to recover despite their efforts, and eventually burying it in the same grave as two of their own — represents, on the available scientific evidence, the earliest currently-verifiable point in the long trajectory of the relationship between humans and dogs at which humans were, in essential respects, treating a specific dog as one of them.
The post 14,000 years ago, at the end of the last Ice Age, a group of hunter-gatherers in Germany nursed a seriously ill puppy for weeks before it died — and when it did, they buried it in the same grave as two of their own, the oldest verified evidence of a bond between humans and dogs appeared first on Space Daily.