This dog has been friends with humans for more than 15,000 years, but where and how this friendship began is not entirely clear. A new study suggests that the domestication of wolves and their transformation into dogs may have occurred twice independently in different parts of the Eurasian continent.
gray wolf
There are approximately 900 million dogs in the world today, and they belong to many different breeds. As we all know, domestic dog (Canis familiaris) is the result of human domestication of a wild predator, the gray wolf (Canis lupus). Some scientists even believe that dogs are a subspecies of the same species (Canis lupus familiaris).
This process occurred gradually, beginning more than 15,000 years ago, at the end of the last Ice Age, when the Earth's high latitudes were cold and dry. According to one hypothesis, the bolder wolves approached the houses and began to interact with humans. As the years and centuries passed, more and more tamed wolves passed on these genes to their pups, which made them particularly good protectors and hunting assistants.
However, there is still a lot that is unclear on this issue. Some geneticists believe that dogs first originated in East Asia, while others point to Siberia, the Middle East, Western Europe and elsewhere. Now, a large team of researchers from 16 countries has taken a different approach to the problem.
They created a detailed map describing wolf family relationships. "If you think of the wolf lineage as a big jigsaw puzzle, then we basically add a piece to it that corresponds to dogs," from Francis Crick Institute and Harvard Medical School (USA) said Skoglundbridge, lead author of the study. ).
Overall, a new article in the leading scientific journal Nature has 81 (!) authors, mainly archaeologists, anthropologists and geneticists. The researchers studied the genomes of 72 wolves that lived across Europe, Siberia and North America over the past 100,000 years.
Scientists were surprised to find that wolf populations from different parts of the world are so closely related genetically. Even after centuries and millennia, European predators from, say, Alaskan populations share close relativesāprobably due to active migration and their regular crossings.
When comparing the genomes of wolves and modern dogs, they found that they are closer to East Asian predator populations than to the original European animals. At the same time, no ancient wolf is a direct ancestor of dogs, so it's impossible to say with confidence exactly where they were domesticated.
The authors concluded that two different wolf populations could become domestication materials. A common ancestor living in northeastern Europe, Siberia and North America. Meanwhile, dogs from the Middle East, Africa and Southern Europe have independent origins. This could mean there were two independent domestication events before the animals merged into a single global population.
Additionally, the researchers were able to identify juvenile animals that lived 18,000 years ago and were discovered in 2019 in the permafrost of nearby Yakutia. Its genome was also used for research, and the results were unmistakable: the sample belonged to a wolf.
