Mikhail Sablin

Russian Academy of Sciences | RAS · Zoological Institute

The grey wolf (Canis lupus) was the first species to give rise to a domestic population, and they remained widespread throughout the last Ice Age when many other large mammal species went extinct. Little is known, however, about the history and possible extinction of past wolf populations or when and where the wolf progenitors of the present-day do...

Janssens et al. (2021, doi: 10.1002/ar.24624) recently commented on our article (Galeta et al., 2021, doi: 10.1002/ar.24500) regarding the morphological differences between putative Paleolithic dog and Pleistocene wolf crania. The authors argued that these differences reflect the normal population variation of wolves, that some of the cranial measu...

Middle and Upper Palaeolithic sites, where mammoths dominate the faunal assemblages, are mainly found in Central and Eastern Europe. At these sites concentrations of skulls, tusks and long bones, interpreted as deliberate constructions, often occur. Rare instances of weapon tip fragments embedded in mammoth bones provide direct archaeological evide...

The Kostenki-Borshchevo site complex (Voronezh region, Russia) serves as the foundation of Eastern Europe’s Upper Paleolithic chronocultural framework. Here we present new radiocarbon dates for three Kostenki sites. Dates of ∼27.5–27 ka BP for Kostenki 15 suggest that its archaeological layer accumulated over a short period. These results help to c...

The Epigravettian site of Yudinovo (Bryansk oblast, Russia) was discovered in 1930 by K.M. Polikarpovich. It is located in the Sudost’ river valley and has a unique stratigraphy. This article presents the results of the study of the remains of large mammals from Yudinovo and also discusses their significance in revising the former interpretation of...

The Early Pleistocene locality Muhkai 2 was discovered in Central Dagestan, northeastern Caucasus, Russia, in 2006. Archaeological investigations of the site have been directed by Corresponding member of RAS H.A. Amirkhanov (Institute of Archaeology RAS, Moscow). The article presents the results of the study of osteological material from the excava...

The Streletskian is central to understanding the onset of the Upper Palaeolithic on the East European Plain. Early Streletskian assemblages are frequently seen as marking the Neanderthal-anatomically modern human (AMH) anthropological transition, as well as the Middle-to-Upper Palaeolithic archaeological transition. The age of key Streletskian asse...

Reindeer herding emerged among the indigenous Sámi of Northern Fennoscandia between ca. 800 and 1500 CE. While the details of the reindeer domestication process are still actively debated, it has been hypothesized that the transition to reindeer herding affected Sámi ritual practice, especially animal offerings given at various sacred sites. To exp...

This article continues the publication of information about the osteological remains of the Pazyryk horses, which are stored in the funds of the Zoological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences (St. Petersburg). Among the available collections, materials from the burial mounds of such Altai sites as Katanda-II and Aragol were identified. The...

The article presents the results of the study of osteological material from the Antique settlement of Golubitskaya 2 (Krasnodar Territory, Taman Peninsula, Russia) from the excavations of 2007–2019. Archaeological investigations of the settlement have been directed by PhD D.V. Zhuravlev (State Historical Museum, Moscow). In total, 5996 mammalian bo...

Dogs were the first domestic animal, but little is known about their population history and to what extent it was linked to humans. We sequenced 27 ancient dog genomes and found that all dogs share a common ancestry distinct from present-day wolves, with limited gene flow from wolves since domestication but substantial dog-to-wolf gene flow. By 11,...

The antiquity of the wolf/dog domestication has been recently pushed back in time from the Late Upper Paleolithic (14,000 years ago) to the Early Upper Paleolithic (EUP; 36,000 years ago). Some authors questioned this early dog domestication claiming that the putative (EUP) Paleolithic dogs fall within the morphological range of recent wolves. In t...

This article presents the publication of complete and fragmented skeletons of dogs found in the course of excavations at the settlement Golubiyskaya 2, Taman peninsula, South Russia. All dogs belong to the “laika type”. No traces of eating dogs or culinary cutting were found on bones. The paper presents an interpretation of these findings. Most of...

The multilayer settlement Rakushechny Yar situated in the lower Don River (Rostov region, Russia) is one of the oldest early Neolithic sites in this region, dated to the 7th and 6th millennia BC. Recent investigations have shown a particular importance of this site in the study of the spread of the Near Eastern "Neolithic package" and the neolithis...

Despite the successful conservation of the Przewalski’s horse (PH), Equus ferus przewalskii Groves, 1986 in captivity and reintroduction attempts in Mongolia, there is little knowledge on the genetic variability of these populations. We studied 76 non-metric characters of 130 PH skulls to assess epigenetic variability within and epigenetic distance...

A single burial mound is located on the right bank of the Serteyka River (north-western Russia). It was discovered by E.A. Schmidt in 1951 and is attributed to the Old Russian Period. New researches on the burial mound conducted in 2013 and 2014 have uncovered several diachronic constructions. The first stage was connected to a flint knapping site,...

A single burial mound is located on the right bank of the Serteyka River (north-western Russia). It was discovered by E.A. Schmidt in 1951 and is attributed to the Old Russian Period. New researches on the burial mound conducted in 2013 and 2014 have uncovered several diachronic constructions. The first stage was connected to a flint knapping site,...

Domestic dogs have been central to life in the North American Arctic for millennia. The ancestors of the Inuit were the first to introduce the widespread usage of dog sledge transportation technology to the Americas, but whether the Inuit adopted local Palaeo-Inuit dogs or introduced a new dog population to the region remains unknown. To test these...

Genome-wide analysis of 67 ancient Near Eastern cattle, Bos taurus, remains reveals regional variation that has since been obscured by admixture in modern populations. Comparisons of genomes of early domestic cattle to their aurochs progenitors identify diverse origins with separate introgressions of wild stock. A later region-wide Bronze Age shift...

The site of Kostënki 21 (also known as Gmelin or Gmelinskaia) is located on the very edge of the Don River at Kostënki (Voronezh Oblast, Russia). The main archaeological horizon, layer III, is dated to c. 23,000-21,000 14 C BP (c. 27,500-24,500 cal BP) and contained six concentrations of archaeological material, mostly interpreted as the remains of...

The multilayer settlement Rakushechny Yar situated in the lower Don River (Rostov region, Russia) is one of the oldest early Neolithic sites in this region, dated to the 7th and 6th millennia BC. Recent investigations have shown a particular importance of this site in the study of the spread of the Near Eastern “Neolithic package” and the neolithis...

Le loup, effrayant protagoniste de nombreux contes, partage notre monde depuis l'âge glaciaire. Le chien, meilleur ami de l'homme, est également originaire de cette époque. Il descend d'un des plus redoutables prédateurs du Dernier Glaciaire : le loup pléistocène.

Several questions remain regarding the timing and nature of the Neanderthal-anatomically modern human (AMH) transition in Europe. The situation in Eastern Europe is generally less clear due to the relatively few sites and a dearth of reliable radiocarbon dates. Claims have been made for both notably early AMH and notably late Neanderthal presence,...

Genome-wide analysis of 67 ancient Near Eastern cattle, Bos taurus, remains reveals regional variation that has since been obscured by admixture in modern populations. Comparisons of genomes of early domestic cattle to their aurochs progenitors identify diverse origins with separate introgressions of wild stock. A later region-wide Bronze Age shift...

Résumé Le gisement d’Eliseevichi 1, situé dans le bassin du Dniepr, plus particulièrement dans la vallée de la Desna, a été découvert en 1930 par K.M. Polikarpovich. Il est contemporain des occupations épigravettiennes de la fin de la seconde moitié du Pléniglaciaire supérieur (20 000–14 000 BP). Comme pour les sites de la culture de Mézine (Mézine...

Near Eastern Neolithic farmers introduced several species of domestic plants and animals as they dispersed into Europe. Dogs were the only domestic species present in both Europe and the Near East prior to the Neolithic. Here, we assessed whether early Near Eastern dogs possessed a unique mitochondrial lineage that differentiated them from Mesolith...

The paper presents zooarchaeological analysis of the remains of Stenon horse Equus (Allohippus) stenonis from the site Muhkai 2a (layer 2), Central Dagestan, Russia. They are of special interest because of their large number and can testify to one of the first visits of an ancient man in the North Caucasus – about 1.95 million years ago. As a resul...

The dog is the only species that was domesticated before the origin of agriculture, when human populations were living as hunter-gatherers. Two main scenarios explain the early domestication of the wolf. They can be summarized as follows. The self-domestication model considers that fossil wolves were attracted to prehistoric garbage dumps at human...

The paper contains the study results of the settlement Rakushechny Yar fauna from the excavations of 2013-2017. It is a reference site for this region, because it has a unique stratigraphy. It was possible to determine 201 bones of mammals, birds and turtles at the early Neolithic layers of Rakushechny Yar. The fish remains at the settlement are nu...

Significance The majority of viral genomic sequences available today are fewer than 50 years old. Parvovirus B19 (B19V) is a ubiquitous human pathogen causing fifth disease in children, as well as other conditions. By isolating B19V DNA from human remains between ∼0.5 and 6.9 thousand years old, we show that B19V has been associated with humans for...

Domestication has particular salience in archaeology, and numerous recent theoretical papers describe this process as a set of evolutionary, ongoing, social, and material relationships between humans and select other species. In contrast, analytical papers on the domestication of dogs nearly always involve a search for their origins as marked by ch...

The neolithisation process started in different parts of Europe at various times. On the Eastern European Plain, the Neolithic period began much earlier than in Central Europe, including its Polish territory. The Serteya region is one of the key areas of Neolithic settlement in Eastern Europe and within Eurasia. Many archaeological sites, dating ba...

Higher δ ¹⁵ N values in bone collagen of mammoth ( Mammuthus primigenius ) compared with coeval large herbivores is a classic trait of the mammoth steppe. An exception applies to the Epigravettian site of Mezhyrich (ca. 18–17.4 ka cal BP) in the central East European plains, where mammoth bones have δ ¹⁵ N values equivalent to or in a lower range t...

Trans-Baikal, the interior region just to the east of Siberia's Lake Baikal, has a fairly extensive but largely unstudied archaeological record of human interaction with domestic dogs. This region's archaeological dog remains are documented for the first time in this paper. New radiocarbon dates indicate that dogs first appear in this region by at...

The dog is the only species that was domesticated before the origin of agriculture, when human populations were living as hunter-gatherers. Two main scenarios explain the early domestication of the wolf. They can be summarized as follows.The self-domestication model considers that fossil wolves were attracted to prehistoric garbage dumps at human s...

Triangular, concave-base ‘Streletskian points’ are documented in several assemblages from the Kostёnki complex of Upper Palaeolithic sites in south-western Russia. Some of these assemblages have been argued to evidence very early modern human occupation of Eastern Europe. However, Streletskian points are also recorded from younger contexts, notably...

Equus (Allohippus) stenonis из местонахождения Мухкай 2а (слой 2, Центральный Дагестан, Россия). Они представляют особый интерес из-за своей многочисленности и могут свидетельствовать об одном из первых пребываний древнего человека на Северном Кавказе-около 1.95 млн. лет назад. В результате сравнения состава и соотношения костей лошади Стенона, осо...

Much of the fossil record for dogs consists of mandibles. However, can fossil canid mandibles be reliably identified as dogs or wolves? 3D geometric morphometric analysis correctly classifies 99.5% of the modern dog and wolf mandibles. However, only 4 of 26 Ust'-Polui fossil mandibles, a Russian Arctic site occupied from 250BCE to 150CE, were ident...

Předmostí is one of the most famous Gravettian sites in Central Europe. Its fame is based on a unique human assemblage, sadly largely destroyed during the Second World War, a huge mammoth assemblage and a very rich large canid assemblage. It has been shown previously that mammoth played an important role in the subsistence practices of the Gravetti...

Předmostí is one of the most famous Gravettian sites in Central Europe. Its fame is based on a unique human assemblage, sadly largely destroyed during the Second World War, a huge mammoth assemblage and a very rich large canid assemblage. It has been shown previously that mammoth played an important role in the subsistence practices of the Gravetti...

Tooth pendants of European elk, Eurasian beaver and brown bear are the most common artefact type in graves at Late Mesolithic Yuzhniy Oleniy Ostrov on Lake Onega, northwestern Russia. In one burial of a 20-35-year-old woman, 18 fragments of wild boar tooth pendants from at least five individuals were found. Wild boar was not a regular part of local...

Ust’-Polui is one of the most extensively studied archaeological sites in the western Siberian Arctic. New radiocarbon ( ¹⁴ C) dates for charcoal, faunal remains, bark, hide, and human bone from this site are presented. When modeled, the charcoal dates span from ~260 BC to 140 AD, overlapping with the dendrochronology dates from the site. These dat...

The Przewalski’s horse (Equus ferus przewalskii), the only remaining wild horse within the equid family, is one of only a handful of species worldwide that went extinct in the wild, was saved by captive breeding, and has been successfully returned to the wild. However, concerns remain that after multiple generations in captivity the ecology of the...

Diverse landscapes and ecosystems stretching across Europe led to diverse hunter-gatherer cultural records during the Upper Paleolithic and Mesolithic. In response to abrupt climatic forcing, starting around the Late Glacial Maximum and followed by climatic events such as the Bølling–Allerød and the Younger Dryas in the Terminal Pleistocene, archae...