16,000 years of companionship

An artist’s reconstruction of a site in Turkiye 15,800 years ago, based on evidence from archaeological excavations by University of Liverpool researchers. New research pushes the first genetic evidence of dogs back by 5,000 years and suggests that hunter-gatherer groups may have acquired dogs from one another. — Kathryn Killackey/The New York Times

IN the waning days of the last ice age, when humans hunted with spears and turned cave walls into canvases, a hot new trend was spreading across the Paleo­lithic world.

By roughly 14,000 years ago, hunter- gatherer societies across Europe had discovered dogs, scientists reported in two new papers published recently in Nature.