Within another thousand years after that, domestic dogs were present in North America, as well. The earliest remains appear in Europe, the Middle East, and Kamchatka (on Russia's Pacific coast) all within 1,500 years of each other.
And once things that were clearly dogs started appearing, they appeared over a huge geographic range. The earliest domesticated dogs, which appeared about 15,000 years ago, looked a whole lot like the wolves they were descended from, making unambiguous identification of domestic vs. The source of domesticated dogs, the gray wolf, historically ranged across all of North America, Europe, and Asia. The challenges of sorting out what happened from archeological remains are significant. That's the conclusion of a study that appeared in this week's PNAS, which uses a combination of genetic, archeological, and historic evidence to argue that the history of domestic dogs is such a mess that we're not going to be able to unravel it without resorting to large-scale genome sequencing efforts.
It was a nice picture, but apparently it was probably wrong. And, with the advent of molecular tools, researchers were able to identify the animal that was domesticated (the gray wolf), as well as a handful of breeds that appear to be "ancient," and split off close to the source of domestication. Dogs were the very first creatures that humans domesticated, and their remains have been found along with those of humans from before we even had basic things like agriculture.
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