A domestic dog or a wolf? The difference seems easy enough to spot today, but the distinction was not always so evident. For years, scientists struggled to determine whether a pair of frozen puppies from around 14,000 years ago were early domestic dogs or wolves. Now, a new analysis could bring this debate to a close, confirming that the frozen pups were probably not early domestic dogs, but wolves, based on the animals’ bones, teeth, and soft tissues.
Published today in Quaternary Research, the analysis also shows that the two puppies were siblings — sisters around two months old — and ate a diet of milk, meat, and plants, with woolly rhinoceros as their final feast.
“It was incredible to find two sisters from this era so well preserved, but even more incredible that we can now tell so much of their story, down to the last meal that they ate,” said Anne Kathrine Runge, a study author from the University of York Department of Archaeology, according to a press release.
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Ice Age Puppies Discovery
Frozen in soil and ice around 14,000 years ago, the “Tumat Puppies” were found in Siberia — around 25 miles from the village of Tumat — in 2011 and 2015. Their bodies were discovered inside their den, where they were trapped, buried, and frozen after a probable landslide, around what appeared to be a human butchery site.
That the puppies were discovered so close to a human hangout, where the burned bones of woolly mammoths were strewn, created a debate as to whether the pups were early domestic dogs or wolves. Attempting to determine their true identity, a previous study suggested that the puppies were probably wolves from a population that disappeared without any ties to domestic dogs today.
To confirm that conclusion, the new analysis of bone, tooth, and soft tissue indicates that the pups’ lifestyles and diets were much more suited to wolves than to domestic dogs.
“Whilst many will be disappointed that these animals are almost certainly wolves and not early domesticated dogs, they have helped us get closer to understanding the environment at the time, how these animals lived, and how remarkably similar wolves from more than 14,000 years ago are to modern-day wolves,” Runge said in the release.
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Stomach-Fulls of Woolly Rhinos
The puppies’ stomach contents, which were absent of mammoth meat, were a particularly strong sign that the pups were probably wolves.
Instead of hanging around humans for food, the pups consumed solid foods such as birds, grasses, leaves, and twigs, as well as milk from their mother.
“We can see that their diets were varied, consisting of both animal meat and plant life, much like that of modern wolves,” said Nathan Wales, another study author from the University of York Department of Archaeology, according to the press release. This varied diet also suggests that they lived in a similar environment to modern wolves, surrounded by diverse habitats and their inhabitants.
Based on its degree of digestion, woolly rhinoceros meat had been the wolf pups’ final meal — a surprising find, considering the creature’s massive size in comparison to the majority of modern wolf prey. As such, the meat probably came from a woolly rhinoceros calf, hunted and fed to the pups by adult wolves, which were possibly larger in the Ice Age than they are today.
“The hunting of an animal as large as a [woolly] rhinoceros, even a baby one, suggests that these wolves are perhaps bigger than the wolves we see today,” Wales said.
According to the team, the pups’ soft tissues provide important insights into the lives and lifestyles of wolves that aren’t always provided by the bones and teeth.
“We know grey wolves have been around as a species for hundreds of thousands of years,” Wales said. “The soft tissues preserved in the Tumat Puppies, however, gives us access to other ways of investigating wolves and their evolutionary line.”
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Quaternary Research. Multifaceted analysis reveals diet and kinship of Late Pleistocene ‘Tumat Puppies’
Sam Walters is a journalist covering archaeology, paleontology, ecology, and evolution for Discover, along with an assortment of other topics. Before joining the Discover team as an assistant editor in 2022, Sam studied journalism at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.
