Wolves survived the ice age as a single, global population

Humans have domesticated many animals. Dogs were not a distinct population of wolves before or after the event. There are a lot of ambiguous skeletons that are older than the ancient ones. The genomes of modern and ancient dogs can be used to understand what happened. The analysis is dependent on what you think the wolf populations were.

Researchers have created a clearer picture of the evolution of wolves. Despite being spread across the globe, the population remained a single unit and was refreshed from a core in Siberia. The East Asian wolves are thought to have contributed to the creation of many dog breeds. Some people seem to have gotten input from a Middle East population, but it's not clear if that population was wolves or dogs.

Wolves around the north

The ability to sequence ancient DNA was essential to this new work which involved obtaining DNA from 66 wolf skeletons that collectively span about 100,000 years of evolution. Wolves are found in the Northern Hemisphere, and the skeletons used here tend to be closer to the top of the world. Europe, Asia, and North America make up the majority of them. Some of the modern wolves' genomes were included in the researchers' analysis.

You would expect to find regional populations that don't mix with each other. The most closely related genomes tend to cluster together. The ancient wolf genomes came together in time. No matter where the wolves lived on the planet, they were most likely to be related to each other at the same time.

Local wolves developed after the last peak of the last ice age. The wolves around before the ice age's peak are more similar to the others.

How did these animals keep their genetic continuity even though they were so far apart? Apparently, the population in Siberia has grown many times. Around 100,000 years ago, there was a wolf population in Europe. The ancestral European presence was reduced to between 10 and 40% depending on the animal. All present-day wolves in North America are a result of interbreeding with coyotes.

There is a consequence of having a global population. There are 24 areas of the genome that appear to carry useful adaptation, and all of these useful stretches of DNA show up in all of the wolf populations examined.

Gone to the dogs

We don't know what to say about dogs. Just before the last peak of the ice age, they looked like the Siberian wolves. The connection between wolves and dogs was not strong when they were older. It's possible that dogs were derived from a specific wolf population.

There's a good match if you have a population of wolves with a small amount of their genes coming from a different canid in Asia. The ancestry of some dog breeds in East Asia can be seen today.

The wolf population in Europe and Africa is most closely related to a wolf from Syria. According to the researchers, a dog from about 7,500 years ago had half its genome from the local source and the other half from Siberia. Up to 60 percent of the genomes of many dogs in Africa and Europe come from this additional descendant.

Their data supports a model where dogs were first domesticated in Eastern Asia, where most of the breeds present are from. It came into contact with another population as it spread around Asia. The population could have been wolves, a dog population that had been domesticated separately, or it could have been somewhere between the two.

Genetically, wolves are unusual in having a global population that's regularly churned up in a way that affects long-term regional populations. There isn't much point in looking for a wolf population that dogs are related to as a way to find out where dogs were domesticated. If there was a wolf population at the time, it would likely mix with other populations soon after.

The nature of the year 2022. About DOIs can be found on the website.