A dog's paw prints survive on a 4,000-year-old mudbrick from a burnt house at Tavşanlı Höyük

A dog stepped on a mudbrick at Tavşanlı Höyük, a Bronze Age mound in Kütahya province in western Türkiye, while the clay was still wet, and its paw prints have survived for about 4,000 years. Mehmet Nuri Ersoy, Türkiye's Minister of Culture and Tourism, announced the find on 26 October 2026.

Once dry, the brick went into the wall of a house. According to the minister, the building later caught fire and collapsed during the Bronze Age, and the excavators found the brick in its rubble. He calls Tavşanlı Höyük one of the largest Bronze Age cities of western Anatolia.

Prof. Dr. Erkan Fidan, who heads the archaeology department at Bilecik Şeyh Edebali University, has directed the excavation since 2021. A 2025 study he co-wrote, of 1,361 animal bones from the 2021 and 2022 seasons, describes a town that lived mainly on sheep, goats, cattle and pigs, with limited hunting of deer and wild boar.

Dogs reached Cyprus more than six thousand years earlier. The earliest on the island, according to its excavators, is a small dog from Ayios Tychonas-Klimonas, a Neolithic site near Limassol dated to about 8700 BCE [1, p. 3]. The team, among them Jean-Denis Vigne and Jean Guilaine, suggests that it lived with people and may have helped them hunt the island's small wild boar [1, p. 15]. Dogs remained part of village life through the rest of the Aceramic Neolithic, as the island's early diet shows.