Tooth Fossil suggests Modern Dog didn't come from Middle East/Asia

Squeaky the Squirrel

Siberian fossil revealed to be one of the oldest known domestic dogs

Opinion: We Didn’t Domesticate Dogs. They Domesticated Us.

Wibbs

Squeaky the Squirrel wrote: »

Opinion: We Didn’t Domesticate Dogs. They Domesticated Us.

Ive been saying that for yonks. IMHO trying to pin down the domestication of wolves as one clean event in our history is on a hiding to nothing. I strongly suspect it happened many times in many places, throughout the last 80,000 years(and I would go that far back). It happened many times, but the notion died out equally as many times and domestication genes went back and forth into the wild wolf population. One example of that is wolves with black fur in the US. That colour originally comes from the dog.

Lately I've been suspecting maybe, just maybe Neandertals might have had the odd wolfdog around too. But again because of the lack of overall population and lack of vector for the idea, the idea died out. When there begins to be more of us around, the idea doesn't die out and spreads, so by 40,000 years ago the dog is quite a common meme in our species. Plus with more of us about there would have been simply more encounters and competition and interactions with wolves.

Squeaky the Squirrel

Wibbs wrote: »

Ive been saying that for yonks. IMHO trying to pin down the domestication of wolves as one clean event in our history is on a hiding to nothing. I strongly suspect it happened many times in many places, throughout the last 80,000 years(and I would go that far back). It happened many times, but the notion died out equally as many times and domestication genes went back and forth into the wild wolf population. One example of that is wolves with black fur in the US. That colour originally comes from the dog.

Jolly, so it does.

"It also shows that human activities can help enrich the genetic diversity of wild animal populations, which is a very unexpected finding."

lol:rolleyes:

enrichment - 1 (Anyone know of another one?)
whatever the opposite is - The rapid loss of species we are seeing today is estimated by experts to be between 1,000 and 10,000 times higher than the natural extinction rate.

http://www.businessinsider.com/extinct-animals-2011-11?op=1


Miniature African Forest Elephants Could Be Extinct in 10 Years

This Bird Has Spent Nearly 20 Years Waiting For Endangered Species Protection

Pressure from lobbyists, especially from the oil industry, has also slowed the program's progress.

:mad:

Squeaky the Squirrel

Doggies skull/More Info

In 1975, a team of Russian archaeologists announced that they’d made a remarkable find: From a cave in the Altai Mountains of Siberia, they’d unearthed a 33,000-year-old fossil skull that resembled a wolf. In 2011, an anatomical analysis suggested that the fossil was a hybrid of a wolf (with its large teeth) and a dog (with its shortened snout), raising the possibility that it was a partly domesticated wolf—in other words, one of the oldest ancestors of the modern dog ever discovered.

At the time, though, DNA analysis was needed to make certain that the fossil came from an ancestor of man’s best friend. A paper published today in the journal PLOS ONE confirms that fact, indicating that the creature was more closely related to modern dogs than wolves, and forcing scientists to reconsider the dog’s evolutionary family tree.

To come to the finding, a team led by Anna Druzhkova of the Russian Academy of Sciences sequenced mitochondrial DNA taken from one of the skull’s teeth. This type of genetic material comes from an organelle inside each cell called the mitochondria, which has a distinct type of DNA that’s separate from the cell’s normal chromosomes. For each individual, mitochondrial DNA is inherited directly from one’s mother without any modifications and thus remains relatively constant over generations, except for the gradual effect of mutations. Similarities found in such DNA collected from various animals helps scientists understand the evolutionary relationships between species.

The research team compared their sample of mitochondrial DNA from the ancient skull with samples from 70 different modern breeds of dog, along with 30 different wolf and 4 different coyote DNA samples. Their analysis found that the fossil’s DNA didn’t match any of the other samples perfectly, but most closely resembled the modern dog breeds, sharing the most similarities with Tibetian Mastiffs, Newfoundlands and Siberian Huskies in particular.

Scientists know that dogs evolved as a result of the domestication of wolves, but the specific time and location of this domestication is still poorly understood—and this discovery further complicates that picture. Most experts agree that dogs predate the invention of agriculture (which happened roughly 10,000 years ago), but some say that domestication may have occurred as long as 100,000 years ago.

This finding—and the previous radiocarbon dating of the skull which established its age—set that event to at least 33,000 years ago. However, dogs may have been domesticated from wolves multiple times, and this breed of Siberian dog may have actually gone extinct, rather than serving as an ancestor for modern dogs. Archaeological evidence indicates that, with the onset of the last glacial maximum (around 26,000 years ago), humans in this area of Siberia may have stopped domesticating dogs, maybe due to food scarcity. In that case, an independent domestication elsewhere may have led to the dogs of today.

On the other hand, domestication in the vicinity of the Altai Mountains, as evidenced by this finding, may have led to the geographic spread of dogs elsewhere in Asia and Europe, even if they died out in Siberia. Previously, many have suggested that the first domestication occurred in the Middle East or East Asia, but this skull could force scientists to rethink their theories. The research team behind the analysis notes that finding more ancient dog remains will help us in putting together the puzzle.

Adam Khor

Right, and then there's the cases we commented already in another thread, about foxes being seemingly semi-domesticated in prehistoric times, and about that miniaturized, possibly also domesticated dire wolf in North America...