Dogs Moved With Humans: 73 Ancient Canine Genomes Trace Holocene Dispersals Across Eastern Eurasia

An international team led by Shao-Jie Zhang and Guodong Wang of the Kunming Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, has used ancient dog genomes to trace how canines and people spread together across eastern Eurasia. The work appears in Science, vol. 390, issue 6774, pp. 735–740.

The team analyzed 73 ancient dog genomes, including 17 newly sequenced samples—14 of them from China’s Hexi Corridor, Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia—spanning nearly ten thousand years. Shifts in canine ancestry tracked closely with the movements of ancient East Asians, Ancient North Siberians, Eastern European hunter-gatherers, and steppe pastoralists.

The authors conclude that dogs, as cultural companions of humans, dispersed together with distinct human cultural groups, making canine genetic structure an independent line of evidence for reconstructing eastern Eurasian population history. In special regions such as the Arctic, however, the dog populations also show clear signs of exchange and trading, indicating that canine movement there did not always mirror human migration directly.

The result overlays the history of the first domesticated animal onto that of the people it lived with, offering an animal-genome perspective on Holocene interaction networks across eastern Eurasia.

Source: Shao-Jie Zhang, Guodong Wang et al. Science, Vol.390, Issue 6774, pp.735-740, 2025-11-13.