The relationship between dogs and humans may date back 40,000 years – up to 30,000 years longer than previously thought – new evidence suggests.

Studies of a rib bone from the most recent common ancestor of domestic dogs and wolves, found in a remote region of Siberia several years ago, suggests that the two species split between 27,000 and 40,000 years ago, when modern humans started colonising Europe and Asia.

Previous estimates dated the emergence of domestic dogs at about 10,000 to 20,000 years ago, during the last Ice Age.

• Nikon creates a camera your dog can use
• War on Terrier: John Oliver takes down Barnaby
• Dogs in bandannas make world record attempt

“Although separation isn’t the same as domestication, this opens up the possibility that domestication occurred much earlier than we thought before,” Harvard Medical School professor Pontus Skolgund, who led the study, said.

Skoglund and his team sequenced DNA from the 35,000-year-old rib bone, then compared the sequences with those from modern wolves and dogs.

“Dogs may have been domesticated much earlier than is generally believed,” said Love Dalen from the Swedish Museum of Natural History.

Dalen said the only other explanation for the unusual bone was the less likely possibility that a major divergence between wolf populations took place at that time that gave birth to modern wolves while the wolf population became extinct.

The Taimyr wolf lived a few thousand years after Neanderthals disappeared and modern humans spread throughout Asia and Europe, the study said.

DNA analysis also showed modern Siberian Huskies and Greenland sled dogs have an “unusually large” number of genes in common with the Taimyr wolf.