Societies don’t change in a vacuum; an influx of new people and ideas inspire locals to start new practices. To figure out when major societal changes happened, archeologists dig up and analyze the items ancient people left behind.
Archeologists previously established an approximate timeline for when society’s practices shifted in the northwestern Siberian Arctic, including when ancient people started to handle metal tools (about 2,000 years ago) and use reindeer for transportation and as livestock (about 800 years ago). But researchers wondered who influenced the ancient Siberians to take up these new ways of life.
Genome sequencing brought archeologists and geneticists together, and the combination of physical and molecular evidence helps them paint a more thorough picture of ancient life. However, researchers performing genetic analyses of ancient Siberians hit a wall; there was little evidence of this community interacting—and mating—with outsiders during the time periods of societal change.1,2 To solve this mystery, an interdisciplinary team led by Laurent Frantz, a professor of paleogenomics at the University of Munich, looked elsewhere in the animal kingdom. In work described in PNAS,3 the researchers analyzed the genomes of ancient Siberian dogs to figure out where their ancestors and their owners had come from.
“Where humans go, so go their dogs,” said Elaine Ostrander, a chief and distinguished investigator in the cancer genetics and comparative genomics branch at the National Human Genome Research Institute, who was not involved in this study. “Studies have shown that in parts of the world where it's very hard to track what ancestral humans were doing, dogs—man's best friend—are a great way to do that.”
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