The story of when and where dogs were domesticated is still shrouded in mystery. A new study of ancient DNA shows that modern dogs are more closely related to wolves from Asia – but another group of wolves from Europe has also contributed to their ancestry
at the Francis Crick Institute in London and his colleagues analysed the DNA of 72 ancient wolves from skeletal remains that were found in Europe, Siberia and north-western America, some of which were up to 100,000 years old.The researchers sequenced the DNA of these ancient wolves and compared it with the genome of modern-day dogs. They hoped to find out whether any of the wolves were more closely related to modern dogs than the others.
Finding an ancient wolf that is particularly related to a modern dog would give researchers a better idea of when exactly dogs evolved. “This is one of the biggest questions in human prehistory,” says Bergstrom. He and his team didn’t find such a wolf in this study, but they did learn that modern dogs were more genetically similar to ancient wolves in Asia than European ones.
Bergstrom says they can’t be more specific than that because they don’t have enough ancient wolf samples. “There are still big parts of the map where we don’t have many samples.” This is largely to do with the fact that DNA is preserved for longer in colder climates, he says. Most of the samples that the team studied came from the northern hemisphere and were found in permafrost and caves, which preserve genetic material well.. “It’ll be somewhere where we don’t have any samples yet.”
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