Dogs weren’t always our best friends. Humans domesticated them from gray wolves over 15,000 years ago. However, it’s still not clear where this happened.
New research shows that all dogs share genetic ancestry with ancient wolves from East Asia. But some dogs share additional ancestry with wolves from the Middle East. Researchers suggest that dogs might have been domesticated twice, or dogs from Asia interbred with wild wolves in the Middle East as they migrated westward.
The team sequenced genomes from 72 ancient canine fossils from Europe, Siberia and North America that spanned the last 100,000 years. By tracing genetic changes across 30,000 generations, the researchers reconstructed the timeline of the species’ evolution.
The unprecedented timescale of the genomic analysis helps researchers see “evolution play out in real time rather than trying to reconstruct it from DNA today,” says Pontus Skoglund, senior author and group leader at the Francis Crick ...
