Dogs Could Have Joined Humans More Than Once, Ancient Wolf DNA Has Revealed

The beloved pooch snoring on your couch or sticking a snoot under your arm came from a completely different place. The diverse fuzzbutts that fill our homes and hearts are the result of dogs diverging from gray wolves.

It's not clear when and how this process happened. There is some light at the end of the tunnel when it comes to how wild wolves became some of our dearest friends.

The Francis Crick Institute in the UK has increased the number of ancient wolf genomes in order to create a detailed picture of the wolf's ancestry.

Dogs derive their ancestry from at least two separate wolf populations, one of which contributed to all dogs and the other which contributed to some dogs.

The Canis familiaris is the same species of dog as the chihuahua and mastiff. All of them are descended from wolves. There is a lot of debate about the timelines. Some scientists think that the process began over a century ago.

The DNA of 32 dogs was included in recent work by Bergstrm. Dogs diversified 11,000 years ago, so it had to have happened before then. Between 40,000 and 20,000 years ago, domestication began in different parts of the world.

Roughly 30,000 generations of wolves across Europe, Siberia and North America are covered by the new work, which is based on 72 ancient wolf genomes.

They were compared against other canid species, such as coyotes.

The dogor, locked for 18,000 years in the Siberia permafrost, and the 32,000-year-old head of a wolf were among the samples.

Dogor is an 18,000-year-old wolf puppy. The man is Sergei Fedorov.

Both ancient and modern dogs are related to ancient wolves in Asia, according to the genomes. Domestication may have begun in the East instead of the West.

Something was not normal. Dogs in Northeastern Europe, Siberia, and the Americas derive most of their genes from wolves. Dogs from the Middle East, Africa, and the South of Europe have a common ancestry with wolves.

It's possible that dogs were domesticated more than once in different parts of the world. It's possible that dogs were domesticated first in the East and then mixed with wolves.

None of the genomes in the study are a direct match, so more information is required.

The team was able to learn more about ancient wolves. Over the course of about 10,000 years, they traced agene variant that went from being very rare to almost ubiquitous. Almost every dog and wolf is affected by thismutation, which is involved in the development of head and jaw bones.

The team doesn't know why this is so common, but it may have to do with natural selection. It's1-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-6556

"This is the first time scientists have directly tracked natural selection in a large animal over a time-scale of 100,000 years, seeing evolution play out in real time rather than trying to reconstruct it from DNA today," said geneticist and senior author Pontus Skog Lund.

The wolf species was highly connected over large distances, which made it possible for the whole wolf species to be affected. wolves were able to survive the ice age because of the connection

The findings show that temporally wide-ranging whole-genome studies can give us more detailed insight into how species change over time.

The next step in the research is to find out which wolves were the ancestors of modern dogs. The team is looking into other parts of the world that are not covered by this analysis.

The research was published in a journal.