According to the Siberian division of the Russian Academy of Science, the first dog was domesticated in Asia earlier than originally believed. 

Russian and foreign researchers conducted additional investigations and dated a skull of a canine located in a cave at Razboinichya in the Altai Mountains lying in Southern Siberia. The skull was first discovered in the 1970s.

Newly-conducted scientific tests show that the dog is clearly the oldest in Asia. The bones of the animal are at least 33 500 years old. 

The cave, from which the skull of the ancient dog was recovered, was replete with remains of many other prehistoric animals, including wolves, the brown bear, fox, the cave hyena, mountain goats, and smaller vermin.  

When carbon dating was originally performed on the skeletal remains sometime in the 1980s, the bones that were used in the testing were those of the brown bear. The bear's skull was dated as being 18 000 years old.

Radiocarbon testing was once again performed on the bones within the past decade, after the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology became interested in the specimens. Those tests results showed the bones to be 52 000 years old. At the same time, Russian scientists expressed concern over the indirect nature of the analysis carried out by foreign scientists.   

Nikolai Ovodov of the Archeology and Ethnography Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences and Yaroslav Kuzmin, senior researcher of the Institute of Geology and Mineralogy of the Russian Academy, decided once again to conduct direct carbon dating of the bones of the ancient dog. 

The problem with radiocarbon testing as it was performed in the 1970s and 1980s was that it resulted in the loss of the precious specimens. Today's AMS radiocarbon technology used by laboratories in the West would render unusable only one gram of the tested object. Because Russian laboratories do not have AMS radiocarbon dating machines, the tests on the dog's skull were performed in the U.S., the U.K., and Holland. At the conclusion of the analysis, researchers determined that the dog lived at least 31 century before the Common Era.  

In 2009, scientific teams working out of Belgium, Russia, the U.K., and Germany discovered a domesticated dog in Goyet Cave in Belgium. The remains of that animal were determined to be at least 36 500 years old.  

Yaroslav Kuzmin noted that the world now knows of two ancient dogs, one that was found in Belgium and the other in Altai. The dogs lived about thirty-three to thirty-six thousand years ago. In terms of its outward appearance, the dog found in Altai is very similar to a canine specimen found in Greenland and dated as being only 1 000 years old. Still, the ancient dogs are distinct from wolves in their morphology.   

Scientists have now come to conclude that dogs have been domesticated more than once by humans at various places in the world. The continuation of the first domestication of the canine species was interrupted by the onset of the Ice Age some twenty-six thousand years ago. It appears based on preliminary conclusions that the last domestication of the dog took place 17 to 18 thousand years ago, as the global temperatures started to rise. Although, Russian scientists are yet to confirm the validity of that anthropological theory.