Dogs have helped Baikal hunters for 12-17 thousand

This is evidenced by dog ​​bones and bite marks on the bones of wild animals.

Hunters who lived at the Ust-Khaita I site (Irkutsk region) began using domestic dogs in their craft 12–17 thousand years ago. This is stated in the article, a preprint of which was published on the journal’s website Anthropology.

The site was discovered in 1996, but its materials have not yet been fully explored. A group of archaeologists led by Alexey Tetenkin from the Irkutsk National Research Technical University processed the “old” finds and conducted new excavations at Ust-Khait I.

As a result, they identified several unequipped fire pits, and in them several hundred artifacts: fragments of stone tools, waste from the production of these tools, and animal bones. Judging by the latter, the inhabitants of the site hunted elk, bison, roe deer and red deer, and dogs helped the hunters in this. Archaeologists discovered not only the bones of the “helpers” in the fire pits, but also the marks of their teeth on some bones of wild animals from the same objects. The bones of the “prey” also had cuts from cutting up the carcasses. The researchers note that traces of dogs’ participation in hunting on bones from Ust-Khait I are some of the earliest such evidence in Eastern Siberia.

Residents of the Ust-Khayta I site used pebble tools (handpicks and scrapers), as well as scrapers and burins made of flint and argillite, a clayey sedimentary rock. Among the finds there are also fragments of fish bones, fishing gear and tools that could have been thrown.

Based on materials press service of the Russian Science Foundation.