Natural Sciences Active Updated Aug 11, 2026
The 14,000-year bond between dogs and humans, mapped in bone and brain
Archaeologists and neuroscientists are piecing together how dogs and humans co-evolved over roughly 14,000 years, from early graves where dogs were buried like kin to modern brain scans showing dogs have dedicated neural circuitry for reading human emotion. The stakes are understanding how deeply human social life has been reshaped by, and has reshaped, another species over millennia.
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Aug 11, 2026 Latest
Archaeologist Peter Mitchell argued in a new book that the earliest human-dog bond, evidenced by dogs buried beside humans in graves as old as 14,000 years, began closer to a partnership between equals than one-sided domestication, with dogs later diverging into forms matched to their people, from heavily coated Arctic sled dogs to Tibetan Plateau dogs sharing genetic fixes for thin air with local humans. Separately, a University of Vienna team scanned eight dogs, mostly border collies, in an fMRI and found their temporal cortex and reward-center caudate nucleus activated specifically for happy human faces, building on the same lab's earlier finding that dog brains register anger, sadness an
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