[ad_1]
The dog is the oldest domestic animal in the service of man, but its genetic history has been relatively unknown because archaeological finds have been scarce.
In a report presented in the scientific journal Sciences A group of Swedish and international researchers has examined the complete genome of 27 prehistoric dog skeletons, the oldest almost 11,000 years old. Since then, its genome has been compared to modern dogs, wolves, and jackals.
Older than expected
The results show that even at that time there were five different genetic types of dogs spread all over the world. This means that the domestic dog is significantly older than previously thought.
“Probably all the dogs that are living now are descended from a wolf that was domesticated around 20,000 years ago, in the midst of the last ice age,” says Pontus Skoglund, a geneticist at the Francis Crick Institute in London and one of the authors.
No one knows where in the world the first wolf was domesticated. All geneticists can say is that it belonged to a now extinct species, and that the people who adopted it lived as hunters and gatherers.
It was probably a difficult project, since a similar so-called domestication, that is, adaptation to humans by breeding, of wild wolves does not appear to have been repeated later.
Dog trade?
The rest is a success story. Dogs quickly spread around the world and soon appeared all over the world. Sometimes it can be seen that spread follows human migration, for example when the first dogs followed hunters from Siberia to America during the ice age.
In other cases, they appear to have traveled without any sign of migration.
– It is a mystery how it could happen, and it makes us ask questions about human activity during the Stone and Bronze Ages. Perhaps there was a trade in dogs between groups of people, as with pottery, for example, says Pontus Skoglund.
Science World Nov 16 “How Dogs Conquered the World” is about the origin of dogs.
