Prehistoric Dog Names

Written By Matilda Siebrecht

One of the most fascinating aspects of archaeology is that some of the questions people ask most often are the ones we are least equipped to answer. For example: What was a dog's name 10,000 years ago? Did people mourn their dogs the way we do today? What stories did they tell about them around campfires? How did the first people who lived alongside dogs actually think about them?

These are questions that emerge frequently whenever archaeologists discuss dogs, and for good reason. Dogs occupy a unique place in human history. They are not merely one of many domesticated animals. They are the earliest known domesticate, appearing in archaeological contexts thousands of years before livestock, horses, or cats became widespread companions of human communities. Yet the closer we get to the emotional side of that relationship, the harder it becomes to find answers. Archaeology excels at reconstructing behaviours. It is much less effective at reconstructing feelings.

Consider one of the most famous examples of human-dog relationships in prehistory: the Bonn-Oberkassel burial, dated to approximately 14,200 years ago. Archaeologists uncovered the remains of a man, a woman, and a dog buried together. Subsequent analysis suggested the dog had suffered from canine distemper as a puppy and survived for several weeks despite being seriously ill. Researchers argue that the animal would likely have required intensive human care to survive for as long as it did. The significance of the burial is not simply that a dog was buried with people. Rather, it suggests a relationship extending beyond practical utility. The animal appears to have received care during a period when it could not have contributed meaningfully to hunting or protection. While we cannot know what the people called this dog, or event understand exactly what they thought about it, we can observe evidence of investment, care, and social significance (Janssens et al. 2018).

A similar story emerges from the famous site of Ain Mallaha. Dating to roughly 12,000 years ago, a burial contained an elderly human with their hand resting upon a puppy. This discovery is often cited as one of the earliest archaeological indicators of a close emotional bond between humans and dogs. Again, we cannot reconstruct conversations, names, or beliefs. But we can see choices. Someone intentionally buried these individuals together, creating a relationship in death that mirrored one in life (Davis and Valla 1978).

Both of these discoveries reveal both the power and limitations of archaeology. When many people imagine archaeology, they picture dramatic discoveries, be it a tomb, a lost city, or a spectacular artefact. In reality, archaeology often operates through inference of a burial position, tooth wear, stable isotope values, or ancient DNA. The field frequently works by assembling fragments of evidence into increasingly probable interpretations. And dogs provide some of the best examples of this process.

Ancient DNA studies have transformed our understanding of dog domestication over the last decade. Research led by Greger Larson and colleagues demonstrated that the story is far more complex than earlier models suggested. Rather than a single straightforward domestication event, dog origins likely involved multiple populations of wolves and humans interacting across Eurasia over thousands of years (Larson et al. 2012; Frantz et al. 2016). Yet even with genome-wide data, some of the most interesting questions remain unresolved. We can track ancestry. We can estimate population movements. We can identify dietary shifts. But DNA cannot tell us whether a particular dog was beloved, feared, respected, or simply tolerated.

This gap between what archaeology can know and what archaeology cannot know is not a weakness of the discipline. In many ways, it is what makes archaeology compelling. Every excavation uncovers evidence of human lives that were once as complicated as our own. The people who buried dogs, cared for sick puppies, or traveled alongside canine companions across Ice Age landscapes likely debated, joked, grieved, and formed attachments just as we do today. The difference is that most of those experiences leave no direct archaeological trace, and so the result is a field defined as much by good questions as by definitive answers.

Dogs sit at the centre of that challenge. Their archaeological record demonstrates cooperation, migration, companionship, and care stretching back thousands of years. At the same time, they remind us how much of the human experience exists beyond artefacts and bones. We may never know the names of the first dogs but, thanks to archaeology, we can begin to understand why people remembered them.

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Matilda Siebrecht
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