There are clues as to what the ice age was like within remains left over from the time period. In a rare new discovery, one of those frozen time capsules – an old puppy – had an extra surprise waiting in his belly.
Researchers recently discovered the 14,000-year-old mummified canine, which still has intact fur and teeth. Inside the stomach, scientists found the remains of other animal, complete with yellow fur.
DNA sequencing indicates that the ice age baby ate pieces of a woolly rhinoceros shortly before he died. An earlier autopsy led to the conclusion that the megafauna-spun meal was a caveat, that idea has now been reversed. The analysis was part of a larger study on woolly rhinos published this week Current biology.
The finding could lead to new ideas about ancient dog populations, evolutionary history, and how a puppy managed to adopt a massive prehistoric animal.
Researcher Edana Lord, in Ph.D. student at the Center for Paleogenetics, tells Inverse that the woolly rhino discovery was “quite unexpected”.
“As far as we know, it is very unusual to find tissue from another animal stored in the stomach,” says Lord, “although some research has been done on plant debris from stomach contents.”
Lord and her colleagues named the puppy mummy Tumat, after the Siberian site where it was discovered in 2011.
Preserve History – Genetic analysis of old dogs and rhinos is made possible by both permafrost and mummification.
Frozen soil in Siberia preserves ancient animals. It is “essentially like a giant freezer, keeping things cold for thousands of years,” Lord explains. If an animal is buried soon after it dies – if it falls into a crevice, for example – it can be mummified, she says.
The result is a sample both frozen in time and literally frozen, giving researchers a snapshot of life during the late ice age. That’s what we end up with old dogs like Tumat and Dogor, an 18,000-year-old furry sample that was previously discovered by some of the same researchers. An analysis of Dogor’s DNA put the puppy somewhere between a wolf and a dog.
“Working on these types of specimens gives us a better understanding of what the ice age animals looked like [compared to their modern counterparts], “Says Lord. Well-preserved samples provide more detailed evidence for diet and health, including a dog’s endless meal.
Specimens that maintain their fur and tissue are also easier subjects for DNA analysis, Lord says. They “tend to have much higher levels of DNA, so we can get more genetic information from them and even sequence their entire genomes,” she explains.
“This allows us to ask a whole host of questions about their population and evolutionary history.”
Tumat’s diet asks a confusing question: How did a puppy manage to eat a woolly rhino in the first place? Lord notices that Tumat was often part of a sheared pack – ancient kanids working together to take down megafauna.
It is also possible that someone else was involved in the hunt – such as a different carnivore than an early human. “It’s really very interesting to speculate,” Lord says.
