Dogs are descended from the gray wolf (Canis lupus) and their domestication is estimated to have occurred during the Ice Age 15,000 to 30,000 years ago.
Today’s dogs come from at least two different populations of ancient wolves, one from eastern Eurasia and one from the Middle East and southwestern Eurasia (where southern European dogs also come from), according to a new international study by geneticists and archaeologists.
The study is another step in solving the mystery of where man’s “best friends” were domesticated, one of the greatest questions of human prehistory.
Dogs are descended from the gray wolf (Canis lupus) and their domestication is estimated to have occurred during the Ice Age 15,000 to 30,000 years ago. The gray wolf is believed to have been the first wild species to emerge from a domesticated species.
However, it is still unknown exactly where this happened and whether it was a unique location or many where the domestication took place. Most other animals were domesticated after the advent of agriculture, but dogs were domesticated when humans were still hunter-gatherers.
The new study, led by Dr Pontus Skoglund of the Francis Creek Institute in London and published in the journal Nature, analyzed the genomes of 72 ancient wolves that lived over a period of 100,000 years in Europe, Siberia and North America. during the Late Pleistocene about 129,000 to 11,700 years ago.
Archaeologists from 16 countries contributed to the study, as well as nine ancient DNA analysis laboratories.
Comparative analysis of the genomes concluded that both ancient and modern dogs are genetically more similar to ancient wolves in Asia than in Europe, an indication that domestication originally occurred somewhere in the East.
At the same time, however, evidence was found that two separate populations of ancient wolves contributed DNA to the dogs. Early dogs from northeastern Europe, Siberia and the Americas appear to have up to almost 100% a unique origin from the East, but early dogs from the Middle East, Africa and southern Europe appear to be about a percentage. 50% from another group of Middle Eastern wolves.
This may be because the dogs have been domesticated more than once, with different populations then mixing. Alternatively, it is possible that there was a domestication, but the subsequent dual descent of the dogs is due to the fact that an early population then mingled with wild wolves in western Eurasia.
Almost all modern dogs today appear to have a dual origin, with the oldest being found in Israel and dating to about 7,000 years ago.
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