Securely identified dog burials and dog-like canid remains appear at sites dated to roughly 14,000 to 15,000 years ago, with contested candidates reaching considerably further back. The Bonn-Oberkassel burial in Germany, where a young canid was interred alongside two humans, is among the least disputed early cases. Every other domesticated animal, from sheep to cattle to chickens, arrives after the beginnings of settled agriculture.
Genetic work complicates the picture rather than settling it. Dogs derive from a grey wolf lineage that is not represented among living wolves, so the ancestral population cannot be sampled directly. Estimates for the divergence of that lineage run considerably earlier than the oldest accepted archaeological dogs, which is expected: population separation precedes the morphological changes that make a skeleton recognisably domestic.
The number of domestication events remains unresolved. Some analyses argue for a single origin, others for separate eastern and western beginnings with later admixture. What is agreed is that the process happened among mobile foragers, and that early dogs were shaped by proximity to human camps rather than by deliberate breeding programmes.