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Gray wolves in an anthropogenic context on a small island in prehistoric Scandinavia

Linus Girdland-Flink,Anders Bergström,J. Storå,Erik Ersmark,Jan Apel,Maja Krzewińska,L. Dalén,Anders Götherström,P. Skoglund

Published 2025 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America

ABSTRACT

Significance Wolves, the wild ancestor of dogs, are the only large carnivores that have undergone domestication by humans. Yet, it remains unclear if this process took place via direct and deliberate human control of wild wolves or if wolf populations gradually adapted to the human niche. Here, we report two canid individuals with gray wolf genetic ancestry excavated from a human archaeological site on a small isolated island in the Baltic Sea dated to between three and 5,000 y ago. The remote island location in combination with the anthropogenic burial context, low genome-wide heterozygosity, marine-rich diet, and small size, are all consistent with a scenario in which these individuals were under human control, but other explanations are also possible.

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