The Natural History Museum/ Alamy - The extinct Japanese Wolf (Canis lupus Hodophilax).
According to a study that sequenced nine museum specimens of the species' genomes, the Japanese wolf is closer to the ancestor dog than any other wolf. The study was done more than 100 years ago.
Yohey Terai, a graduate student at the Graduate University for Advanced Studies Japan, said that I didn't expect this conclusion.
Although it has been known for a long time that dogs evolved from greywolves, there is no evidence that living wolves are closely related. The current theory is that dogs evolved out of an extinct group of wolves. But which ones?
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Canis lupus hodyophilax, the Japanese wolf, was a subspecies of grey wolves that was smaller than other grey wolves. Although the last known wolf was killed in 1905 there are specimens in several museums across Japan and Europe. Terai and his associates were able to obtain tissue samples, mainly of bones, which could be used for DNA extraction.
These genomes were compared with other wolves' and dogs' to show that the Japanese Wolf is part of an evolutionary branch of wolves that originated between 20,000 and 40,000 years ago. While some of these wolves became Japanese wolves, others gave birth to dogs.
This split was most likely to have occurred in East Asia, which suggests that this region is where the direct wolf ancestor of dog scouts lived. Terai plans to extract DNA from the ancient wolf bones in this area to confirm his theory, but such preservation is unlikely to be good.
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He says that even if the East Asian wolf ancestor of dogs is confirmed, it doesn't mean that dogs were domesticated there.
Terai states that it is impossible to determine the date when dogs first began to be in a relationship to humans using the genome data. This requires archaeological evidence.
It is also evident that there was interbreeding after the initial split between the Japanese wolf and early dog lines. Because 2 percent of the DNA of a 10,000-year old sled dog is derived from Japanese wolves, this must have occurred at least 10,000 years ago. The team believes that this interbreeding occurred before Japanese wolves arrived.
The highest concentration of Japanese wolf DNA is found in New Guinea singing dogs and dingoes, which are both around 5.5%.
Reference: bioRxiv, DOI: 10.1101/2021.10.10.463851
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