14,000-year-old mummified ‘puppies’ unearthed with fur still intact in ‘incredible’ discovery

Two well-preserved 14,000-year-old “puppies” might not have been puppies at all.

New research has shown that, after undergoing genetic testing, the ice age “puppies” found melting out of the permafrost in Northern Siberia were actually wolf cub sisters — not domesticated dogs, as previously thought.

The study, published in the journal Quaternary Research, revealed that the wolf littermates died somewhere between 14,100 and 15,000 years ago.

The “Tumat Puppies,” still covered in fur and naturally preserved in ice for thousands of years, also had traces of their last meal still in their stomachs, which included meat from a woolly rhinoceros and feathers from a small bird called a wagtail.

Anne Kathrine Runge, an archaeologist at the University of York in the UK, and her team analyzed genetic data from the gut contents as well as chemical signatures in the bones, teeth and soft tissue.

Experts now believe that the animals were two-month-old wolf pups, believed to be sisters, with no evidence of interacting with people.

“It was incredible to find two sisters from this era so well preserved, but even more incredible that we can now tell so much of their story, down to the last meal that they ate,” wrote lead study author Anne Kathrine Wiborg Runge, an archaeologist at the University of York in the U.K., said in a statement.

“Whilst many will be disappointed that these animals are almost certainly wolves and not early domesticated dogs, they have helped us get closer to understanding the environment at the time, how these animals lived, and how remarkably similar wolves from more than 14,000 years ago are to modern day wolves.”

The mummified animal carcasses were found in 2011 and 2015 along with woolly mammoth bones that were seemingly cut and burned by humans, suggesting that the wolves could’ve potentially been very early domesticated dogs seeking food from humans — hence the woolly rhino meat discovered in one of their stomachs.

However, there was no indication that the pups got their food directly from humans or even from rummaging through humans’ mammoth butchering sites, researchers said.

The sisters “inhabited a diverse landscape that was also occupied by humans,” they wrote, but “this study found no evidence that can conclusively link them to human activities.”

How the wolf cubs died also remains a mystery. Neither showed signs of being attacked or injured either, which suggests that they died suddenly when the underground den collapsed, perhaps triggered by a landslide, and trapped them inside, the study said.

“Today, litters are often larger than two, and it is possible that the Tumat Puppies had siblings that escaped their fate,” study co-author Nathan Wales, an ancient-DNA specialist at the University of York, said in the statement. “There may also be more cubs hidden in the permafrost.”

The DNA testing showed that they likely belonged to a now-extinct population of wolves unrelated to today’s dogs.

Dogs and wolves are closely related, though according to Live Science, they diverged genetically somewhere between 20,000 and 40,000 years ago.

Humans domesticated wild dogs around 15,000 years ago, but it’s never been clear when the oldest domesticated dog came around. One possibility included the Bonn-Oberkassel dog, found in Germany in a human burial dated to 14,200 years ago — and because the Tumat puppies were older than they, it was assumed that they were among the oldest domesticated dogs.

The research shows just how difficult it is for experts to prove when dogs became part of human society.