Dogs have been our best friends for longer than we thought, scientists find

Dogs are often thought of as man's best friend, and it turns out that they may have been by humans' sides for far longer than previously thought.

Scientists have discovered the fossil of part of a dog's jaw in Cheddar Gorge, Somerset, and after testing it, have found it to be more than 14,000 years old.

The dogs we know and love today actually descend from wild wolves.

Humans bred and domesticated them over thousands of years - that means tamed them so they were suitable to live with and could be trained.

This was thought to have happened during the last Ice Age, around the end of that period (about 12,000 years ago).

But lead researcher Dr William Marsh's study shows we've had dogs as companions around 5,000 years earlier than many scientists thought.

The fossil had was dug up in the 1920s, during an excavation of Gough's Cave in Cheddar Gorge, a place where the caves are also known locally for maturing Cheddar cheese.

It then sat in a drawer at the Natural History Museum for years, PHD student at the time Dr William Marsh found an old research paper that asked the question: could it belong to a dog?

After some careful DNA testing a way to read the code inside living things - Dr Marsh discovered yes, it absolutely could!

Dr Marsh was so excited with his discovery, that he rushed to tell his friend and colleague Dr Lachie Scarsbrook, from the University of Oxford and LMU Munich.

"William tells me: 'I found a dog from the early stone age,' and I'm like, 'No you haven't - every other dog has been a wolf,' but he's super confident of it," Dr Scarsbrook said.

"He then shows us his results, and we're like, '(Gosh), this guy might have actually found a dog that far back in time.'"

The research team then used the DNA they'd mapped to test other bones of a similar age found around western Europe and central Anatolia in modern Turkey.

Amazingly, they turned out to be dogs, too!

"We've spent years trying to make sense of ancient samples whose DNA sits between wolves and dogs," Scarsbrook told the BBC. "Everything sat in no man's land because we simply couldn't tell where dogs truly began.

"Then this little jawbone turns up and it is the key to identifying other ancient dogs all across Europe that had just been sitting under our noses this whole time," he continued.