Siberia: 18,000-year-old frozen 'dog' stumps scientists

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-50586508

by neom • 7 years ago

291 89 7 years ago

bbc.com

pistoriusp• 7 years ago

I wonder if that smells bad?

iagovar• 7 years ago

Isn't this dangerous in terms of virus and bacteria re-activation?

kleer0012• 7 years ago

It would have to be a zoonotic pathogen and those tend to be rare.

tempsolution• 7 years ago

Why? The thing could just have trapped human hostile pathogens in its fur, etc.

Bayart• 7 years ago

We've probably already caught everything that can be caught from dogs a long time ago.

senectus1• 7 years ago

You dont think that our immunities may have evolved along with the evolution of the dog bacteria?

Evolution doesn't just mean improvements, it also means dropping that's that dont appear to be useful anymore. If a 20k year old bacteria suddenly starts showing up and we're no longer equipped to deal with them like we used to be...

taneq• 7 years ago

They should check for entombed alien spacecraft nearby just in case it's actually a shape-shifting Thing.

throw0101a• 7 years ago

Interview with one of the professors in evolutionary genetics involved:

Dalén was working in Russia in 2018 when he got a call that local tusk hunters — people searching for mammoth tusk — had found the specimen near Yakutsk in eastern Siberia.

* https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/scientists-don-t-know-i...

* Transcript: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-wednesday...

xwdv• 7 years ago

Maybe the dog waited at the same spot everyday of his life for his owner to return until it finally died from the cold.

OnlineGladiator• 7 years ago

I realize this is a well known reference, but for anybody that wants to cry today:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrVR-01w-4w

kadoban• 7 years ago

That part of that episode is actually a reference itself, to Hachiko https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hachik%C5%8D

Fnoord3• 7 years ago

Reminds me of that forbidden experiment in Siberian Soviet Russia concerning breeding. What they were trying to do is breed a dog based on wolves. All they were doing to achieve that, was choosing the most friendliest wolves. Lo and behold, after a few generations they succeeded already. Selective breeding is a form of genetic modification in itself. Which is a reason to not be (at least pur sang) against gentech / genetic modification. Knowingly or not, we've already been doing it for ages.

[EDIT]Foxes indeed; not wolves.[/EDIT]

beagle3• 7 years ago

I know of the tame silver fox experiment[0] (not wolf), and it wasn't forbidden. Are you referring to a different one?

[0] http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20160912-a-soviet-scientist-c...

Fnoord3• 7 years ago

My bad, it was a fox experiment, indeed.

Regarding "banned", the article mentions:

The study of genetics had been essentially banned in the USSR, as the country's dictator Joseph Stalin sought to discredit the genetic principles set out by Gregor Mendel. Stalin's death in 1953 gave scientists more freedom, but in the early years Belyaev nevertheless worked under the cover that he was breeding foxes to make better fur coats.

Also, it mentions 50 generations:

"The fox farm experiment was crucial, in that it told us that domestication can happen relatively quickly in the right circumstances," he says. "The fact that in fifty generations, they were wagging their tails and barking, this is really incredible."

badrabbit8• 7 years ago

Yes...naturally breed them and let genes modify in accordance of naturality. It is intellectually dishonest to compare that with an educated guessing game of modifying select genes and hoping it turns out OK. The very obvious difference being humans selected which genes to modify with gene editing while selective breeding allowed the reproductive process to select which combination of genes are passed and which are not.

The obvious ethical objection is that human error can happen with gene editing and is intolerable while selective breeding allows for the reproductive system to make errors which are not a responsibility of man but of nature.

Ethical slippery sloping to justify ends sucks!

PhasmaFelis3• 7 years ago

The obvious ethical objection is that human error can happen with gene editing and is intolerable while selective breeding allows for the reproductive system to make errors which are not a responsibility of man but of nature.

It seems like you're saying, either way you can get errors, but if you do it through breeding you can claim it wasn't your fault because, really, Nature did it.

I can't tell if you're serious or not.

sorenjan• 7 years ago

The most interesting thing about that experiment IMO is that as the foxes got friendlier towards humans, they looked more like puppies even as adults. If I remember correctly this is because the trait of trusting strangers is associated with being infantile, so when selectively breeding for that trait you get the puppy like looks too. So not only are they nicer, they're also cuter.

z3t4• 7 years ago

I wonder if it got more difficult to kill them for the furs when they got cuter, more friendly and loving.

sundarurfriend• 7 years ago

pur sang

\ (ˈ)pu̇(ə)r¦säⁿ\

: being such beyond a doubt or to the utmost degree

Etymology: French pur-sang thoroughbred animal, from pur pure + sang blood, from Latin sanguis

(from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pur%20sang )

MrsPeaches• 7 years ago

Did they not also breed an aggressive line as well? Anyone know what happened to them?

peter3032• 7 years ago

We have been breeding housecats for 3,000 years and they arent as friendly as dogs or foxes yet.

djsumdog• 7 years ago

I wonder what preservation will be from this point out. I'm sure they'll take tons of photos, videos and fur samples they'll preserve, but can they keep this specimen in tact? Are there ways to preserve it with the fur and whiskers and maybe even keep it on display as it is, or will it need to be taxidermeried?

Edit: also those teeth! Do any other types of wolves/dogs have that crazy pattern?

ptaipale• 7 years ago

The teeth don't look particularly strange to me. Some modern dogs have teeth that look the same. Just duckduckgo "dog teeth" images.

carrozo• 7 years ago

Once they do tests wouldn’t best option be to refreeze? What a display case too!

pvg• 7 years ago

I don't know what's going to happen with this particular find but if you click through to the pages of various frozen mammoths here

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woolly_mammoth#Frozen_specimen...

you'll see everything from 'dunked in preservative and exhibited' to 'excavated as a giant chunk of permafrost and stashed in an ice cave'. The former seems more typical. Going all out, there's also this - a special facility to keep the specimen cold and, uh, moist it seems?

http://www.iceman.it/en/the-mummy/

CWarner818• 7 years ago

Even modern puppies have those small multiple ridges on their teeth. It's one of the most reliable indicators of a dogs age, as they tend to disappear as the dogs mature.

NeedMoreTea• 7 years ago

Typical carnivore incisors I think - check out lions, tigers and other cats as well as dogs. Much, much sharper than ours, ideal for scraping meat off bone. Pre-molars are much more complex and meat specialised than ours too.

frankharv• 7 years ago

What blows me away is that are able to peel his lips back to display the teeth. I don't understand how 18K year old flesh could still be pliable.

clort• 7 years ago

I'm sure Dr Gunther von Hagens would be interested in preserving this, if they didn't have any other ideas.

Plastination is the process of replacing liquids and fats in the body by plastics, and IIRC if you use silicone it even feels soft and pliable (my friend touched one of the exhibits)

brunoTbear• 7 years ago

Calling it "Dogor" as both meaning Friend in a local language and a play on "dog or wolf" is the kind of word play humor we deserve.

malkia2• 7 years ago

Somehow reminded me of Google's StatusOr C++ type :)

a1369209993• 7 years ago

That seems like a missed opportunity for a "ErrOr" pun.

nevster• 7 years ago

Made me think of Trogdor - "Trog-o-dor"

keyle• 7 years ago

I have to say this is the most impressive preserved animal I've ever seen. Looks like it died a few days ago at best.

l33tman• 7 years ago

You might be on to something, sir...

jolmg• 7 years ago

Radiocarbon dating was able to determine the age of the puppy when it died and how long it has been frozen.

jayalpha• 7 years ago

Check out this little doggy:

https://www.sciencealert.com/a-giant-severed-wolf-head-from-...

david927• 7 years ago

It would be amazing to clone it. I wonder if the DNA is preserved well enough to do that.

bitL• 7 years ago

It should be, but it might not work with contemporary RNA in host cells for cloning.

burtonator• 7 years ago

About 3-4 years ago there was a study showing that the half-life of DNA was much shorter... like around 500 years.

https://scitechdaily.com/researchers-calculate-that-dna-has-...

However, I've always wondered if it would be possible to reassemble the whole DNA via aligning overlapping segments by indexing MASSIVE amounts of DNA.

IT would be VERY expensive to do now with today's tech but might be posssible in 10-20 years.

peter3032• 7 years ago

They have dozens of Neanderthal DNA going back to 70K years. (They stopped being a distinct sub-species 30K years ago) In humans the skull next to the ear are good place to find intact DNA.

jaza• 7 years ago

Doesn't look a day over 10,000.

eucryphia• 7 years ago

Siberia was warmer 18,000 years ago.

TheUndead96• 7 years ago

It is insane how well preserved these remains are

Abishek_Muthian2• 7 years ago

When in 1901 Soviet researchers discovered woolly mammoth on the banks of Berezovka River in Siberia, they could smell its carcass and supposedly scavengers had been feeding on thousands of years old meat![1]

[1]https://youtu.be/fr0Ifw8TJVw

sedatk• 7 years ago

That would be some dry aged steak.

zokula• 7 years ago

Huh? the Soviet Union did not exist in 1901.

cmrdporcupine• 7 years ago

There are apparently multiple occasions when preserved mammoth flesh from the ice age was eaten: https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/57100/time-250000-year-o...

CryptoPunk• 7 years ago

I wonder why Homo Erectuses and especially Neanderthals never domesticated wolves. They co-existed with wolves for hundreds of thousands of years and were social hominids that were, judging by their brain size, technology and culture, quite intelligent.

EDIT: apparently there's some evidence of wolf domestication stretching back hundreds of thousands of years.

kresten• 7 years ago

Has no-one seen The Thing?

Why are they even allowing it to exist?

Burn it.

jamisteven• 7 years ago

This is clearly the unfound dog from the movie "Encino Man".

Siberia: 18,000-year-old frozen 'dog' stumps scientists

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