The wolf genomes could help settle the long-standing mystery of dog domestication.
Roughly 30,000 to 15,000 years ago, the first dogs emerged from gray wolves. Exactly when, where, and how this monumental event occurred isn’t known. For decades, geneticists and evolutionary biologists have been unable to come to a consensus on the long-standing mystery. However, a studyAn international group of collaborators analyzed 72 genomes of ancient wolves from Europe, Siberia, and North America and compared them with modern wolves, as well as modern and ancient dogs.
On the whole, dogs were more closely related to ancient wolves from Asia than from Europe, says Anders Bergström, a geneticist at the Francis Crick Institute in London who co-authored the paper. But, he adds, “We also find that it gets a little more complex.” “While we do make some progress on where dogs fit into the wolf puzzle, we still haven’t solved the question of dog origins,” Bergström says. “The range of possibilities for where dogs came from is still quite large.”
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