At some point in the late Ice Age, in the depths of a cave in southern France, a dog-like creature met a violent end. Its skeleton, astonishingly well-preserved, would lie undisturbed for millennia—until a team of spelunkers stumbled upon it in 2021. Now, the bones from Baume Traucade are raising provocative questions about how far back the human-canine bond truly stretches—and what it originally looked like.

The animal in question was a female canid, roughly 26 kilograms in weight and about 62 centimeters tall at the shoulder. The skeleton was well preserved, allowing Mietje Germonpré, a paleontologist at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences, to compare it with those of fossil and modern wolves and dogs.

Those comparisons, laid out in a paper published in Quaternary Science Reviews, point to a surprising conclusion: the Baume Traucade canid shows strong morphological resemblance to a group known as Palaeolithic dogs—early domesticated or semi-domesticated animals that coexisted with Ice Age humans. Yet the story doesn’t end there.

An Uneasy Alliance

Unlike most prehistoric canid finds—which typically consist of a jawbone here, a partial skull there—the Baume Traucade skeleton is almost entirely intact. That rarity gave researchers a unique chance to study the individual as a whole. Analyses of its cranial and limb measurements strongly confirm that the animal belonged within the Paleolithic dog group, with a confidence level topping 96%.

Researchers believe these dogs, which spread from Belgium to Russia, are part of an early and still poorly understood stage of domestication. They are not necessarily the ancestors of modern dogs, but they do bear telltale signs of human influence. These include smaller body size and shorter, broader snouts—traits associated with selective pressures found in human settlements.

“Palaeolithic humans began to collect wolf pups from dens and raise them at home as ‘pets’ in a tamed state,” Loukas Koungoulos, an archaeozoologist at the University of Western Australia, who was not involved in the study, told New Scientist. He suggests that this may have started during the Last Glacial Maximum, when humans and wolves increasingly shared the same ecological spaces.

Indeed, the Baume Traucade canid seems to have lived a life closely entangled with people. Several of its vertebrae had been broken but later healed—evidence, researchers believe, that it received care after being injured.

A Violent End

But care, it seems, did not guarantee protection. The skeleton also revealed two circular puncture wounds on one of its shoulder blades—unhealed at the time of death. According to Koungoulos, “Punctures to the scapula have been observed in hoofed animals hunted during the Mesolithic to early historic times, suggesting that people aimed their projectiles—spears and arrows—at this part of the body.”

The implication is chilling. Humans struck down this animal.

“It is feasible that the individual obtained [its] injuries from being beaten or struck by people,” Koungoulos adds.

The wounds tell a conflicted story. On one hand, there’s the possibility of companionship—an animal cared for through sickness or injury. On the other, the unmistakable signs of lethal violence.

Why was the animal killed? Was it an act of ritual, necessity, or cruelty? These are questions Germonpré and her team hope to explore in future work, including genomic analyses that may reveal whether this Palaeolithic dog was closely related to modern breeds or belonged to an extinct lineage.

Rewriting the Origins of Domestication

This skeleton joins a sparse but growing list of similar finds across Europe. The Baume Traucade canid dates to just after the Last Glacial Maximum, placing it among the earliest post-Ice Age animals associated with humans. Paleontologists have unearthed comparable remains at sites in France, Germany, and Spain, but few are as complete.

Until now, much of what scientists knew about early dog domestication came from fragmented remains and speculative reconstructions. This discovery offers something different: a full-body portrait of prehistoric man’s best friend.

While still unclear whether these ancient dogs were truly domesticated in the modern sense, they were certainly not entirely wild. They stood at a threshold—no longer wolves, not yet Labradors. The tragic story of this dog offers an important piece of the puzzle.