Image Credit: Ralf Κλενγελ - Zhokhov Island, Russia 
First Dog Breeders Ever Revealed
Dog breeders have been used for centuries to create canines for particular jobs — hunting, working and herding, to name just a few. But where breeding originated from and why has remained a mystery — until now.
Researchers recently discovered that people living on Zhokhov Island (now part of Russia) bred dogs to pull sleds and possibly hunting.
The group lived in extremely cold weather, and believed to be the only people ever known to hunt polar bears without the assistance of firearms. To help them find the bears, they needed dogs to pull the sleds, and now it is believed after analyzing canine bones from Zhokhov, the group specifically bred dogs for this task.
“It’s pretty convincing and very exciting,” Melinda Zeder, an archaezoologist at the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., told Science magazine.
Back then, Zhokhov wasn’t an island. It was connected to Siberia, so the group would also use the sled dogs to help them travel over the plains in search of reindeer.