More than 3,000 years ago, in what is now Kazakhstan, six dogs were laid carefully in the ground. Were they beloved pets? Sacrifices, since they seem to have ritually arranged? No one can say for sure. But for scientists studying how dogs threaded themselves into human history, archaeological finds like these are precious. They provide a chance to peek into the DNA of dogs, to see just how they leapt from one group of humans to another, making their own migrations across continents.

Advances in sequencing ancient DNA have revealed that over millenia, people have moved into new regions in successive waves, sometimes intermingling with local folk, sometimes replacing them entirely. Researchers curious if the same was true for other creatures living alongside them turned to DNA from 17 dogs

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