The mummified pup found in Siberia is not a dog. The cute dog is a young wolf.
Researchers analyzed the genomes of the puppy and ancient wolves in order to understand dog domestication. The dog that was found in the Siberia permafrost in the middle of the year was dubbed "dogor" and had pettable fur and whiskers. Scientists couldn't tell if the 18,000-year-old pup was a wolf or a dog because they couldn't tell if it was related to the earliest dogs.
The Francis Crick Institute in London believes that dogs were the first domesticated animals. The big mysteries of human prehistory include other aspects of domestication. Bergstrm said they don't know where it occurred. We don't know if it happened once or multiple times.
Dogor's genome was one of 66 never-before-sequenced ancient wolf genomes studied by Bergstrm and his colleagues.
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The researchers were looking for clues as to the origin of the dog. Dogs were domesticated from wolves, but the genes of modern wolves have shifted too much over the ages to reveal which wolves were wild. Bergstrm said it was important to look at wolves from the time when dogs were being domesticated.
There were 72 samples that covered 100,000 years of prehistory. wolves flourished throughout the ice age with a globally connected population. Transition from wolf to dog was the most intriguing result. The researchers found that dogs are more closely related to ancient wolves than to ancient wolves.
Bergstrm said that domestication probably happened somewhere in the East or Asia. Asia is very large and we can't really narrow it down.
Northeast Siberia, where Dogor was found, doesn't seem to be a place where wolves are related to the oldest dogs. It's possible that the pre-dog wolves came from a place that has never been surveyed, because there are many other areas in Asia where ancient wolf DNA has yet to be collected.
Dogs from the Near East and Africa have a piece of their genes from a western source, according to genotypic analysis. There are two possibilities for this. The first is that dogs were domesticated in Asia, and as they moved west, they mixed with local wolves. Dogs from the two domestication events that took place in easterly and more westerly locations eventually mixed.
The oldest dog found in the Near East is 7,200 years old, according to Bergstrm. Both the eastern and western genes were present in that specimen.
Bergstrm said that they might be able to say more about whether it was a single process or two domestication processes.
The results were published in Nature.
It was originally published on Live Science
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