The 9,500 year old remains of a dog found on the tiny island of Zhakhov, northern Siberia, are remarkably similar to living dogs in Greenland, genome sequencing has revealed. The discovery shows that people bred dogs for pulling sleds more than 10,000 years ago.

Mikkel Sindling and his team from the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, excavated the remains from an ancient human settlement, along with other less well preserved dogs alongside what look like dog sleds. “We thought it would be a primitive dog, but it’s a long way down the path to domestication – that was quite sensational”, says Sindling.

His team sequenced the remains, along with a 33,000 year old Siberian wolf and 10 living sled dogs from different parts of Greenland, and compared their genomes with each other as well as other dog and wolf genomes. The results show that modern sled dogs in Greenland, who’s ancestors were taken there by Inuit people around 850 years ago, are more closely related to the Zhakhov remains than any other kinds of dogs or wolves. The genomes also show that sled dogs have not acquired any DNA from wolves in the past 9,500 years. Sindling adds “It’s largely the same dog doing the same job”.

A modern day husky rig!