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hubie [soylentnews.org] writes:

The origins of domesticated dogs has been much argued and a quite contentious topic [nytimes.com]. New research suggests that instead of dogs being domesticated in one location and then spreading, they were domesticated at different times and places [sciencemag.org]. The research sequenced the genome of a 5000 year old dog bone found in Ireland and they compared it to the DNA of 605 modern dogs. When they created a family tree, they saw a deep divide between European and Asian dogs.

“I was like, ‘Holy shit!’” says project leader Greger Larson, an evolutionary biologist at Oxford. “We never saw this split before because we didn’t have enough samples.”

Their data suggests that dogs were domesticated in Asia more than 14,000 years ago and that they migrated west. However, there are dog bones that were found in Germany that are more than 16,000 years old, which means there were domesticated dogs already in Europe when the Asian dogs came over.

Some of today’s dogs may carry genetic traces of that early domestication—but it’s hard to find, in part because scientists are still trying to recover DNA from those ancient German dogs. “We don’t know if the dogs that evolved [early] in Europe were an evolutionary dead end,” Frantz says, “but we can safely say that their genetic legacy has mostly been erased from 
today’s dogs.”

[BREAK]

From the journal editor's summary [sciencemag.org] (DOI: 10.1126/science.aaf3161):

The history of how wolves became our pampered pooches of today has remained controversial. Frantz et al. describe high-coverage sequencing of the genome of an Irish dog from the Bronze Age as well as ancient dog mitochondrial DNA sequences. Comparing ancient dogs to a modern worldwide panel of dogs shows an old, deep split between East Asian and Western Eurasian dogs. Thus, dogs were domesticated from two separate wolf populations on either side of the Old World.

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