Many people know that dogs evolved from wolves. Most of the dog breeds we have today only emerged in the past 200 years.
Dogs were first domesticated in the Neolithic period between 29,000 and 14,000 years ago, and have been closely linked to humans ever since.
The only native Australian dog is thought to represent a unique event within canine evolution, having arrived in Australia thousands of years ago.
The exact place in the evolutionary family tree of dogs has never been known.
We used cutting-edge technology to discover that dingoes are fundamentally different from domestic dogs.
In research published Friday in Science Advances, we show that dingoes are an early descendant of the grey wolf and the domesticated dogs of today.
The health of modern breed dogs could be affected by this work.
By studying dogs we can learn how we have influenced their physical and behavioral characteristics.
Dogs only recently developed the ability to raise their eyebrows, a trait likely developed to communicate more effectively with humans. Puppy dog eyes were created for us.
Some examples are not obvious and can only be found by looking deeper into the dogs' genomes.
Dogs need a particular gene to digest starch, according to previous scientific studies. Many dog breeds have multiple copies of the same gene. The wolves and dingo only have a single copy of this gene.
The change in diet for the earliest domesticated dogs likely resulted in this duplication, as they were fed more and more rice.
The same genes have been duplicated in other domesticated livestock animals, which shows how humans can affect their genomes.
For thousands of years, dingos have been geographically isolated from wolves and domestic dogs. We used genetics to understand where the dingo fits in the evolution of dogs and what role it has in the Australian environment.
We only had access to a single dog genome in 2017: a boxer breed. There were many gaps due to the limitations of the technology at the time.
The dingo won a competition held by a US company. We thought about generating a high-quality dingo genome.
To understand the place of the dingo in dog history, we needed several high-quality dog genomes. The German shepherd is a representative breed, followed by the basenji, which is the earliest dog breed used for hunting.
We were able to sequence the genome of Sandy, a pure desert dingo puppy that was found abandoned in the outback.
The development of long-read sequencing technology made it possible to generate high-quality genomes. The completion of the entire human genome has been made possible by this technology.
We measured the number of genetic differences between the dogs and the dingo to see where they fit in.
dingoes are an early descendant of all modern dog breeds, between the wolf and today's domesticated dogs.
The dingo genome has been shaped by demographic and environmental conditions.
The dingo is unlikely to have been domesticated after it arrived in Australia.
Future work on more dingo genomes will address whether the dingo has ever been domesticated at all, and also measure the level and impact of pure dingo crossbreeding with domestic dogs.
In New South Wales and Victoria, there has been substantial crossbreeding of hybrid dingoes.
This knowledge is important. A better understanding of the effect of dingoes cross-breeding with dogs may provide insight into the role dingoes play in the environment.
Knowledge about dingo evolutionary history can help us understand how and when domestic dogs evolved alongside humans, and can help us identify and target new ways to improve their health and vitality.
Humans have been crossbreeding dogs for hundreds of years.
This has resulted in many breed-specific diseases. Dogs are prone to hip dysplasia, golden retrievers are prone to certain cancers, and jack terriers are susceptible to blindness.
dingoes and wolves have high-quality genomes that could be used to determine the cause of diseases. These discoveries could lead to new treatment options for dogs.
Matt A. Field is an Associate Professor at James Cook University.
This article is free to use under a Creative Commons license. The original article is worth a read.
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