Mongrel mix: dogs arose from at least two populations of wolves, study finds

The tale of how grey wolves became the family dog of today has received a new twist, with research suggesting our furry companions arose from two different populations of wild ancestors.

Humans are thought to have domesticated dogs between 15,000 and 30,000 years ago when they were hunters.

After the advent of agriculture, most other animals underwent domestication, according to the first author of the research. Humans would have formed a relationship with this predator in the ice age.

It's not clear how the process happened.

Bergstrm said, "We don't know where it happened, what was the human group that did this, did it occur once or multiple times and so on." It's one of the biggest mysteries in human prehistory.

The puzzle has been investigated before. A recent study suggested that wolves were domesticated independently in east Asia and Europe, but that the latter became extinct with only the former contributing to modern dogs.

Dogs have dual ancestry according to Bergstrm.

66 of the 72 genomes from ancient wolves that lived in Europe, Siberia and North America were the first to be deciphered. The team compared these with other dogs.

The results show that dogs are most similar to ancient Siberia wolves, although these are not direct ancestors.

Bergstrm believes that dogs would have undergone domestication in Asia.

While the ancestry of some early dogs, such as those in Siberia, the Americas, east Asia and north-eastern Europe, appeared to be based solely on wolves from Asia, others, such as those in Africa and the Middle East, were also found to have an Asian origin.

An ancient dog from Israel is the largest source of ancestry, according to Bergstrm.

He said that contributions from the western population of wolves are seen in all modern dogs, even those from the Middle East and Africa.

Questions are still unanswered. Bergstrm said they can't tell if there were two independent domestication events followed by merging of those two populations or if there was just a single domestication process followed by mixing from wild wolves.

He said that the search is narrowing down exactly where the dogs come from.