The story of how gray wolves turned into domestic dogs has taken a new turn today, with research showing that our furry companions originated not only from a population of wild ancestors, but also from two.
Dogs are the first animals domesticated by humans, an event believed to have occurred somewhere between 15,000 and 30,000 years ago, when humans lived as hunter-gatherers.
“Most other animals have been domesticated since the advent of agriculture,” said Dr. Anders Bergström, the first author of the study at the Francis Creek Institute. “I think it’s very fascinating that people in the ice age would come out and make that connection with this ferocious predator.
But how the process went remains unclear.
“We don’t know where it happened, what the human group that did it is, whether it happened once or several times, and so on,” Bergström said. “So it remains one of the great mysteries of human prehistory.
The latest study is not the first to examine the puzzle. Among previous work, a recent study suggests that wolves were domesticated independently in Asia and Europe, but only the former contributed to the origins of modern dogs.
“The main finding from our study, in contrast, is that dogs are of double descent,” Bergström said.
Writing in the journal Nature, Bergström and colleagues report that they analyzed 72 genomes of ancient wolves that lived in Europe, Siberia and North America 100,000 years ago, 66 of which were first sequenced. The team compared them to the genomes of early and modern dogs.
The results reveal that dogs are generally genetically most similar to ancient Siberian wolves, although they are not direct ancestors.
“This basically suggests that the dogs were domesticated somewhere in Asia,” Bergström said, although he said it was not possible to identify the location accurately.
But while the origins of some early dogs, such as those in Siberia, the Americas, East Asia and Northeast Europe, appear to be rooted only in wolves from Asia, others, especially those in Africa and the Middle East, and to a lesser extent in Europe, have been found. that they have an additional genetic contribution from a population of western gray wolves.
“The largest amount of this second source is in an ancient dog that is 7,000 years old from Israel,” Bergström said.
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Moreover, he said, the contribution of this western wolf population is seen in all modern dogs today – although it is greatest in those in the Middle East and Africa, such as the Basenji breed.
But the questions remain. “We still can’t say whether there were two independent domestication events followed by a merger of the two populations, or whether there was only one domestication process followed by a mix of wild wolves,” Bergström said, adding that work remained to be done. determining the geographical origin of our canine companions.
“Demand continues to narrow exactly where the dogs come from,” he said.
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