You didn't know this about your pet dog | Mint – Mint

• Belief says dogs became domesticated during the Ice Age, at least 15,000 years ago. However, it is still unclear where this happened, and if it occurred in one single location or multiple places.

A new study has found out recently that ancestry of pet dogs of today can be traced back to at least two populations of ancient wolves.
Led by Francis Crick Institute in London, an international group of geneticists and archaeologists analysed 72 ancient wolf genomes spanning the last 100 centuries from Europe, Sibera, and North America, reported Yahoo Finance on 1 July.
With this study, the researchers hope they will get insight into ‘one of the biggest unanswered questions’ about human history – how dogs underwent domestication.
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Belief says dogs became domesticated during the Ice Age, at least 15,000 years ago. However, it is still unclear where this happened, and if it occurred in one single location or multiple places.
In the study, researchers used previously excavated ancient wolves remains, which includes a perfectly preserved head from a Siberian wolf that lived 32,000 years ago and an 18,000 year-old wolf puppy from Yakutia, a republic of Russia.
Based on the study, experts found that early and modern dogs are more genetically similar to ancient wolves in Asia than those in Europe. This indicates domestication may have taken place somewhere in the east.
The evidence also suggests that two separate populations of wolves contributed to the DNA of dogs today, the study says.
Also, the earliest domesticated dogs from north-eastern Europe, Sibera and Americans appear to have a single shared origin from Asia. While early dogs from Africa, southern Europe, and the Middle East likely originated from both Asia and the Middle East.
Following the study, researchers propose two theories. First that wolves underwent domestication more than once, with the different populations later mixing together.
And the second is that domestication happened only once, and that these early dogs mixed with wild wolves.
“Through this project we have greatly increased the number of sequenced ancient wolf genomes, allowing us to create a detailed picture of wolf ancestry over time, including around the time of dog origins,” said post-doctoral researcher in the Ancient Genomics lab at the institute Anders Bergström.
“By trying to place the dog piece into this picture, we found that dogs derive ancestry from at least two separate wolf populations – an eastern source that contributed to all dogs and a separate more westerly source, that contributed to some dogs,” he added.
As per the researchers’ prediction, over a period of 10,000 years, at least one gene variant went from being very rare to being present in every wolf, and is still present in dogs today.
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