Dogs were the first animals domesticated by humans, a fact that is believed to have occurred between 15,000 and 30,000 years ago, when humans lived as hunter-gatherers. “Most other animals were domesticated after the advent of agriculture,” said Dr. Anders Bergström, lead author of the research at the Francis Crick Institute. “I think it’s very exciting that people in the ice age would have come out and created this relationship with this wild predator.” But how the process happened remains unclear. “We do not know where it happened, what human team did it, it happened one or more times and so on,” Bergstrom said. “So it remains one of the great mysteries in human prehistory.” The latest study is not the first to investigate the puzzle. Among previous work, a recent study showed that wolves were domesticated independently in Asia and Europe, but only the former contributed to the origins of modern dogs. “A key finding of our study, by contrast, is that dogs have a dual origin,” Bergström said. Writing in the journal Nature, Bergström and his colleagues report how they analyzed 72 genomes from ancient wolves living in Europe, Siberia and North America 100,000 years ago, 66 of which were first analyzed. The team compared them with genomes from early and modern dogs. The results reveal that, overall, dogs are genetically more similar to the ancient Siberian wolves, although they are not direct ancestors. “It basically suggests that the dogs would have been domesticated somewhere in Asia,” Bergström said, although he said the location could not be determined with precision. But while the origins of some early dogs, such as those in Siberia, the Americas, East Asia, and Northeast Europe, seemed to have their roots exclusively in wolves from Asia, others, especially those in Africa and the Middle East, and to a lesser extent in Europe, it was found to have an additional genetic contribution from a population of western gray wolves. “Most of this second source comes from an ancient 7,000-year-old dog from Israel,” Bergstrom said. Subscribe to the First Edition, our free daily newsletter – every morning at 7 p.m. BST In addition, he said, contributions from this western wolf population are seen in all modern dogs today – although it is higher in those from the Middle East and Africa, such as the Basenji breed. But questions remain. “We still can not say whether there were two independent domestication events that followed the merging of these two populations or whether there was only one domestication process, followed by mixing of wild wolves,” said Bergström, adding that work remains to be traced to the geographical origins of our cynical companions. “Research is ongoing to pinpoint exactly where the dogs come from,” he said.
