Dogs May Have Evolved From two Different Ancient Wolf Populations
Image Credit:science
A massive new wolf family tree dating back 100,000 years could help researchers understand where dogs were first domesticated
Image Credit:theguardian
Scientists have long speculated about the origins of wolves' transformation into man's greatest friend, as have many devoted dog owners.
Image Credit:scientificaerican
Researchers have now added a sizable new piece to the dog domestication jigsaw, even though they haven't completely solved it.
According to a new article published this week in Nature, modern dogs may have descended from two distinct populations of prehistoric wolves: one in eastern Asia and one in the Middle East.
While it is possible for there to have been two separate domestication events
Image Credit:sutori
A third possibility is that dogs were domesticated in one place and then mixed with wolves in another region, mingling their DNA.
According to Anders Bergström, an evolutionary genomicist at the Francis Crick Institute and one of the study's authors, "we can't tell [the two separate] scenarios apart."
However, we may state that there were at least two wolf source populations.
Image Credit:texaswolfdogproject
The majority of scientists concur that modern dogs sprang from Canis lupus, or grey wolves, at least 15,000 years ago, during the last Ice Age.
There are many unanswered questions regarding the domestication of dogs, including when, where, and with which group of humans wolves first started to transform into dogs
Image Credit:phys
According to previous studies, dogs may have initially been domesticated in Asia, Europe, the Middle East, or maybe in several different places.