The beloved pooch snoring on your couch or sticking a snoot under your arm at dinner time came from a much wilder origin. At some point, dogs diverged from gray wolves under the guidance of domestication, to become the diverse fuzzbutts that fill our
However, something was odd. Early dogs in Northeastern Europe, Siberia, and the Americas derive 100 percent of their DNA from an eastern population of wolves. Early dogs from the Middle East, Africa, and the South of Europe have a DNA contribution from wolves related to modern populations in Southeast Eurasia.This could support previous findings that dogs were domesticated more than once, in different parts of the world.
The study also allowed the team to learn more about ancient wolves, and their evolution. In particular, they traced a gene variant that went from being very rare to almost ubiquitous, over the period of about 10,000 years. This mutation affects a gene called, involved in the development of head and jaw bones, and is still present in almost every dog and wolf today.
"This is the first time scientists have directly tracked natural selection in a large animal over a time-scale of 100,000 years, seeing evolution play out in real time rather than trying to reconstruct it from DNA today,""We found several cases where mutations spread to the whole wolf species, which was possible because the species was highly connected over large distances.
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