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The 14,000-Year-Old Puppy Buried With Its People

By Weird Burial Stories Editorial Desk · 2026-10-08

In 1914 workers near Bonn found a man, a woman, and two dogs in a grave about 14,000 years old. The younger dog was about 27 or 28 weeks old, and a vet argues it survived weeks of illness only because people cared for it.

By C. V. Wooster

In 1914 workers found, by chance and not far from Bonn, a grave holding a man, a woman, and two dogs, about 14,000 years old and called by Leiden University the oldest known grave in which humans and dogs were buried together. The younger dog was about 27 or 28 weeks old, and Luc Janssens argues it could have survived repeated serious illness only if people kept it warm and clean and gave it water, and possibly food.

The quarry grave

Leiden's news of 7 February 2018 is a report on a paper in the Journal of Archaeological Science. It says the grave, with a man, a woman, and two dogs, was discovered by chance in 1914 by a group of workers not far from Bonn. Recent research, the university says, dates the remains to the Palaeolithic, about 14,000 years ago. "This is the oldest known grave where humans and dogs were buried together, and it is among the earliest evidence of the domestication of dogs."

The paper itself, "A new look at an old dog: Bonn-Oberkassel reconsidered," by Luc Janssens, Liane Giemsch, Ralf Schmitz, Martin Street, and Stefan Van Dongen, is more precise about the place and the date. The remains were found a hundred years before the paper, on the eve of the First World War, with the skeletons of an older man and a younger woman. The site was a basalt quarry at Oberkassel, now a suburb of Bonn. Four radiocarbon dates on the dog bones have a weighted mean between 12290 and 12050 cal BC. The conclusion rounds the double burial to 14,200 years ago. The university's "14,000 years" and the paper's calibrated mean are the same find described at two resolutions. There is, the paper says, no statistical difference between the weighted mean age of the woman and the dog at the level the authors use, so the woman and the dog can be treated as buried together.

The paper also reports a second dog. Re-examination found the tooth of another, older and smaller dog. The conclusion says one animal is known from a maxillary molar, a mature dog, and the other from the skull and post-cranial bones of a dog aged at least 28 weeks. Leiden's "two dogs" and the paper's second tooth are the same addition. The grave is not a single puppy laid in with two people. It is two people and the remains of two dogs.

A scarlet macaw buried in the floor of a room at Pueblo Bonito is a different kind of animal grave, in a New Mexico great house rather than in a human coffin: Room 38. The Oberkassel dogs were in the human grave. That is the claim Leiden makes, and it is the one the dates are meant to support.

What the teeth show

The younger dog is the one the study is about. Leiden says it must have been 27 or 28 weeks old when it died. The paper's abstract says it was buried at approximately 27 to 28 weeks. The conclusion says at least 28 weeks. The numbers sit in that band. Janssens, a vet and at the time a Leiden PhD candidate, examined the teeth.

The illness is canine distemper, a morbillivirus, and both sources refuse a certain diagnosis. Leiden says it is not possible to make a definitive diagnosis because the genetic material of the virus has perished. The characteristic damage to the teeth leads Janssens to believe the dog contracted the illness as a puppy, at around three to four months, and may then have had two or possibly three periods of serious illness lasting five to six weeks. The paper is explicit in the same direction: "While morbillivirus infection cannot be presented as a definitive diagnosis, it should remain high on the list of potential differential diagnoses." Usual tests need soft tissue. Bone does not provide them.

What the teeth do show, in the paper, is a line of enamel hypoplasia at the 19-week stage, and two further lines, on the canine only, at weeks 21 and 23. The abstract calls the dog gravely ill. The conclusion hypothesizes that it was extremely sick between 19 and 23 weeks, for six weeks or longer. Most dogs, the paper says, die in the second week of the disease. Surviving a second and third bout, unassisted, is described as almost non-existent.

The care, as a hypothesis

The paper's sentence on what the people would have done is narrower than a headline. "We hypothesize that the dog could have survived only with long lasting and intensive human care. This would have consisted of keeping the dog warm and clean (diarrhea, urine, vomit, saliva), certainly giving water and possibly food." During the active disease the puppy was too sick to be of practical use. The benefit, the authors write, ran the other way. Leiden's news story quotes Janssens in a slightly firmer version: without adequate care a dog with a serious case of distemper dies in less than three weeks, and this dog survived a further eight weeks, which would mean keeping it warm and clean and giving it food and water. The peer-reviewed wording is the one used here for the food. Water is "certainly." Food is "possibly."

The university adds that the dogs were buried with people "who we may assume were their owners," and that the care suggests a relationship between humans and dogs as long as 14,000 years ago. "Owners" is the university's assumption, not a fact the skeletons can prove. The paper's conclusion is also a hypothesis: an emotional bond, a dog kept though it was useless as a working animal. The Death Glossary is where this site files grave goods. The Oberkassel grave had them, the paper says, with the two adult humans. The goods are not the argument. The teeth are.

The dog was buried after the illness, at about half a year of age. How it died is not stated. The sources do not claim it was sacrificed, and they do not claim the virus was recovered from the bone. They claim a grave, two dogs, a young animal with the dental marks of repeated severe illness, and a hypothesis that people kept it alive through those weeks. That hypothesis is the news. The caution is part of the paper, and it stays attached.

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