LGD Migration Routes

Shared Territories

Hominids and wolves share overlapping territories across Eurasia. Wolf bones are found alongside hominid remains in England and China, and wolf skulls are placed at the entrance of Paleolithic shelters in France. This is not domestication—it is the beginning of the longest interspecies relationship on Earth.

The Genetic Divergence

During the severe climate of the Last Glacial Maximum, human hunter-gatherers and wolves share isolated refugia on the mammoth steppe. This forced proximity facilitates the earliest domestication events. Genomic evidence now indicates that major dog lineages—Eastern (East Asian/Arctic) and Western (Europe/Near East)—had already diversified >20,000 years ago.

Source: Bergström et al., “Genomic history of early dogs in Europe,” Nature 651 (March 2026)

Walking Together: Chauvet Cave

The footprints of a 10-year-old child and a large canid (wolf or early dog) are preserved walking side-by-side deep inside Chauvet Cave. This is the oldest physical evidence of a human and canid traveling together—26,000 years before the first city was built.

The Siberian Domestication

Genomic evidence suggests dogs were first domesticated in Siberia by Ancient North Eurasians, setting the stage for their future dispersals—eastward across the Bering Land Bridge into the Americas and westward across the Eurasian steppe. The Razboinichya Cave dog (Altai, ~33,000 ya) may represent the earliest phase of this process.

Magdalenian Expansion

Following the Last Glacial Maximum, Magdalenian hunter-gatherers expand from their glacial refuge in the Franco-Cantabrian region, bringing their dogs northward across Europe. The 14,200-year-old Kesslerloch dog (Switzerland)—analyzed in a 2026 Nature study of 216 canid remains—already shows more genetic affinity to later European dogs than to Asian dogs, proving that east-west differentiation was well underway.

Source: Bergström et al., Nature 651, 986–994 (2026); 141 dog/wolf classifications from genome-wide capture

Siberia → Beringia

Pre-contact American dogs split from eastern Siberian dog lineages during this window. Whether dogs accompanied the very first pulse of humans into the Americas or arrived slightly later with subsequent “migratory dribbles” remains debated—but they arrived before the Bering Land Bridge flooded.

First Confirmed American Dogs

The earliest confirmed domestic dog remains in the Americas are deposited at Koster and Stilwell II in Illinois and Lawyer’s Cave in Alaska. These dogs arrived from Siberia alongside migrating human groups.

Southward into Central & South America

Dogs disperse south, but notably this was heavily delayed compared to initial human migration. The southward dog dispersal was driven by the movement of early agrarian societies spreading maize agriculture, not by the original Paleolithic hunter-gatherers.

Near East → Europe (LBK Farming Migration)

Early farmers migrating from the Near East (Southwest Asia) into Europe bring their dogs with them. These incoming Neolithic dogs interbreed substantially with the dogs of local European Mesolithic hunter-gatherers, shaping the genetic foundation of modern European breeds. The 2026 Nature study confirmed this influx was of smaller magnitude in dogs than in humans, meaning Mesolithic dogs contributed more to modern European dogs than Mesolithic humans did to modern Europeans.

Sources: Ollivier, Tresset et al., “Dogs accompanied humans during the Neolithic expansion into Europe,” Biology Letters 14 (2018); Bergström et al., Nature (2026)

Southeastern European Dispersal

Subfossil dog remains from southeastern Europe document the Linearbandkeramik (LBK) dispersal route—the primary pathway through which Near Eastern farming culture (and its dogs) penetrated into Central Europe. DNA from these dogs shows clear Near Eastern mitochondrial signatures mixed with local European lineages.

Source: Marinov, Yankova et al., “Evidence for Early European Neolithic Dog Dispersal,” Genes (2020)

Levant → Africa

Dogs from the Levant migrate into Africa alongside human livestock herders. They first appear in Egypt and Sudan, then gradually spread southward beside herders into southern Africa over the following millennia. This route explains why the earliest Egyptian dog burials at Hierakonpolis (3800 BC) show dogs that were already fully domesticated and culturally integrated.

Bronze Age Steppe Expansion

Dogs migrate alongside pastoralists expanding from the Eurasian Steppe, contributing to genetic admixture across regions including Siberia, Central Asia, and Europe. Late Bronze Age Srubnaya culture dogs (~3,800–3,200 ya) show increased Western ancestry compared to earlier Botai dogs, confirming accelerating east-west exchange along the proto–Silk Road corridors.

This is the migration wave that carried the ancestors of modern Livestock Guardian Dogs—the Tőbet, Alabai, and proto-Kangal lineages—across Central Asia into Anatolia and the Mediterranean.

Read about the Kazakh Tőbet and Tazy →

First Wave: Maritime Hunter-Gatherers

Paleolithic maritime hunter-gatherers bring the first wave of dogs into Island Southeast Asia, Australia, and New Guinea—introducing the lineages that eventually become the Australian dingo and the New Guinea singing dog.

Second Wave: Austronesian Expansion

Austronesian farming and trading peoples expand from Taiwan, bringing dogs with adaptations for digesting starch—indicating they traveled with cereal crop cultivators. On smaller Pacific islands lacking large game, dogs lost their value as hunters and were sometimes eaten to extinction, only to be reintroduced centuries later.

Thule Inuit Expansion

The Thule (Inuit) people expand across the North American Arctic bringing a new, genetically distinct lineage of specialized sled dogs. These dogs subsequently replace the earlier indigenous Arctic dogs entirely—one of the most dramatic population replacements in canine history, driven entirely by human cultural preference for superior sled-pulling capability.

European Colonization: Near-Total Replacement

Following European colonization, the indigenous dog populations of the Americas suffered a near-total collapse and were almost completely replaced by Eurasian breeds brought by colonists. This devastating loss of genetic diversity resulted from diseases and forced cultural changes imposed upon Indigenous peoples. Similar near-total replacements of indigenous dog populations by European dogs have been documented in the Neotropics, Africa, and the South Pacific.

Today, fewer than 2% of modern American dog genomes carry detectable pre-contact indigenous ancestry. An entire continental lineage of dogs—10,000+ years of co-evolution—was effectively erased in five centuries.