"…The analysis yielded two surprises. First, most living dogs turned out to be more closely related to ancient wolves than to modern ones. "The [gray wolf] population that gave rise to modern dogs is most likely extinct," Thalmann says. The finding supports the results of a whole-genomes study, reported in May at The Biology of Genomes meeting in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, in which Wayne's team also concluded that modern wolves are not dogs' direct ancestors.
The second surprise was geographic: The ancient remains most closely related to modern dogs were all European. For example, the closest wolf relative for the largest branch of modern dogs was 14,500 years old and hailed from a cave in Switzerland; ancient dogs from Germany were the closest relatives of another modern dog branch. "This provides crucial new information," says Renato Mariani-Costantini, a pathologist at the "G. d'Annunzio" University of Chieti-Pescara in Italy who had previously published a mitochondrial DNA study of five prehistoric Italian dogs that suggested a European origin of canines.
Some geneticists argue that dogs became domesticated once agriculture arose, but the new study reinforces the idea that domestication happened much earlier, among hunter-gatherers. Wayne and his colleagues calculate, based on mutation rates and observed genetic differences in their samples, that dog domestication began between 18,800 and 32,100 years ago, and that canines were well entrenched with people between 15,000 and 20,000 years ago, before humans farmed…"
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Amicalement
Armand
discovers a lost dinosaur.
