Despite the key position that dogs hold in the lives of many of us, and the extensive efforts of many previous scientific studies, a surprising amount remains to be learnt about our faithful friends. For example, considerable controversy exists over such basic questions as: When did we first domesticate the dog? Where was the domestication centre? Was there more than one? And perhaps most surprisingly, what was the dog even domesticated from? Given the extent to which we have both moved and shaped dog breeds in recent centuries, and taken a good stab at eradicating their wild relatives, it seems unlikely that analyses of modern genetic material alone will be able to solve these questions. As such deciphering dog domestication represents an exciting frontier on which palaeogenomic approaches stand to make enormous contribution, and indeed, in light of a vastly expanded reference dataset of contemporary genomic material, a number of intriguing findings are already coming to light.