They Kept a Dying Puppy Alive for & Weeks - 14,223 Years Ago

You cannot find the first dog by looking at the dog. An early dog is a wolf with a slightly shorter face, and the measurements overlap — so every claim for the oldest dog turns into an argument that the bones cannot settle. So archaeologists stopped asking what the animal was, and started asking what people did with it. In 1914, quarry workers blasting basalt above the Rhine at Bonn-Oberkassel opened a grave containing two people, red ochre, a carved red deer antler pin — and an animal everyone assumed was a wolf. It sat in a museum for most of a century being wrong. Re-examined with modern methods, it was directly dated to 14,223 ± 58 years. It is a dog. And it was about 27 weeks old — a puppy that never grew up. Its teeth carry three enamel growth arrests, at 19, 21 and 23 weeks of development: three separate episodes of grave illness, most consistent with canine distemper. A puppy in that state cannot hunt, cannot follow a group, cannot walk to water. Alone, it dies in days. This one lived eight more weeks. Somebody carried it. Somebody got water into an animal that could not drink. And when it died, they did not leave it on the floor. — SOURCES — Janssens, L. et al. (2018). "A new look at an old dog: Bonn-Oberkassel reconsidered." Journal of Archaeological Science. (Direct date of 14,223 ± 58 BP; age at death ~27–28 weeks; enamel hypoplasia at the 19, 21 and 23 week developmental stages; morbillivirus/canine distemper interpretation; the second, older dog's tooth.)