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...