Researchers examined a wolf bone about 35,000-year-old that was found under a frozen cliff in extensive geographical region of Siberia. According to the researchers, genetic information from the bone helped them find new information about our long relationship with dogs. Relationship between humans and dogs may have occurred much earlier than previously estimated.

According to reports, dogs of modern world are thought to have descended from wolves. The researchers said that on May 22, they examined the genome of the wolf that used to live in the Taimyr Peninsula of Russia. As per the researchers, they came to know that the wolf belonged to animals that represented common ancestor between dogs and wolves.

The researchers said that they used the genetic information and found that the domestication of dog happened a long time ago. According to them, it had happened between 27,000 and 40,000 years ago. This is not the first research of this kind. A previous research that was based on genetic data from modern-day wolves and dogs found that dogs would have had been domesticated about 11,000 to 16,000 years ago.

Love Dalén, geneticist from Swedish Museum of Natural History, said that the wolf genome demonstrated that the mutation’s rate is just half of what previously had been assumed.

Harvard Medical School geneticist Pontus Skoglund said, “The difference between the earlier genetic studies and ours is that we can calibrate the rate of evolutionary change in dog and wolf genomes directly, and we find that the first separation of dog ancestors must have been in the older range”.

According to Dalén, there are possibilities that the wolf belonged to a population that lived in the Eurasian steppe tundra during the last Ice Age. That time, it used to hunt large prey such as bison and musk ox.