Archaeo-Dogs: Elite team of canines trained to sniff, unearth skeletons from past

Using their noses to sniff out bones up to 3,000 years old, specially trained dogs are helping German archaeologists unearth treasures at ancient excavation sites.

On Saturday, the elite canine team was called to help archaeologist Birgit Anzenberg at a dig site in Neufahrn bei Freising, some 25 kilometres north of Munich in Bavaria.

The area, Anzenberg explains, was inhabited during the Iron Age and early Celtic period. On top of a settlement from those times, there is also an ancient Roman road running through the site. One by one, the dogs, under the guidance of their owners, are let free to sniff through the site, looking for the scent of bone remains signifying potential burial sites.

The dogs are sent out one after the other, Dietmar Kroepel, founder of Archaeo-Dogs, explains: "We meet at an excavation site and then the first dog searches over this limited area as it wants to search. It can go left, right, how it thinks it has to search, where it gets its scent from. And this search gives us certain insights." Afterwards, a different dog is told to start searching, with the owner not being told about the previous dog's findings.