Dogs were already domesticated more than 20,000 years ago

The dog is the first animal to have been domesticated by humans, long before livestock species like sheep and cows. This process dates back to the Upper Paleolithic, a period generally situated between 20,000 and 40,000 BP according to genetic analyses. Researchers suggest that this cohabitation may have begun with self-domestication, as wolves spontaneously approached groups of hunter-gatherer humans.