Many people claim that the dog is descended from the wolf, however, the history of this mammal and its domestication is little known. A study has set out to investigate the origins of the dog from the sequence of three different genomes: the wolf, two of the oldest dog breeds (Basenji and Dingo) and the common jackal, as an outgroup participant, to compare the samples.
The results of the study are surprising and throw up new hypotheses about the domestication and origin of the dog. Curious if the dog is descended from the wolf? Find out below in this article on our site.
Do the domestic dog and the wolf belong to the same species?
Wolves and dogs belong to the same species, Canis Lupus, which is home to a total of 37 subspecies. However, dogs and wolves are considered different subspecies While the wolf is referred to as "Canis Lupus lupus", the dog is referred to as "Canis Lupus familiaris". For its part, the jackal, a mammal that also contributed a genome of the same genus in this study, is classified as "Canis aureus", that is, it does not belong to the same species as wolves and dogs.
Dogs are descended from wolves?
Going deeper into the ancestry of dogs is not an easy task, since it is not really known how they were domesticated and what was the reason for the relationship between dog and man. Some hypotheses point to symbiosis as a probable cause.
The first prehistoric dog on record dates back to around 33,000 years ago, in Siberia, although it is unknown if it was a failed domestication attempt of the wolf or, simply, canids morphologically different from wolves. It is believed that the domestication centers of the dog could have been in Asia, the Middle East and Europe.
To understand the origin of the dog, the genomes of six differentindividuals were sequenced. They first worked with the genomes of three wolves belonging to the aforementioned areas. The genomes of an Australian dingo and a basenji, two very distant dog lineages, were also sequenced, eventually a jackal was also involved. These dog breeds were selected as representatives, because the range of wolves never reached the regions where these two breeds inhabited.
The results of the genome sequences of all the dogs were relevant: 72% of the genome of the wolves coincided with each other, 38% of the genome coincided between both dogs, but only 0, 5% matched between dogs and wolves. Surprisingly, the gene flow between the jackal and the Israeli wolf was significant.
What animal is the dog initially descended from?
The study estimates indicate that wolves and dogs diverged from each other more than 14,900 years ago and that, later, around 1,400 years later, the different lines of wolves separated from each other. It also suggests that the population (or populations) of canids from which dogs originated became extinct and that both wolves and dogs had a common ancestor In In any case, the hypotheses are not totally conclusive
Bibliography
Adam H. Freedman, Ilan Gronau, Rena M. Schweizer, Diego Ortega-Del Vecchyo, Eunjung Han, Pedro M. Silva, Marco Galaverni, Zhenxin Fan, Peter Marx, Belen Lorente-Galdos, Holly Beale, Oscar Ramirez, Farhad Hormozdiari, Can Alkan, Carles Vilà, Kevin Squire, Eli Geffen, Josip Kusak, Adam R. Boyko, Heidi G. Parker, Clarence Lee, Vasisht Tadigotla, Adam Siepel, Carlos D. Bustamante, Timothy T. Harkins, Stanley F. Nelson, Elaine A. Ostrander, Tomas Marques-Bonet, Robert K. Wayne, John Novembre - Genome Sequencing Highlights the Dynamic Early History of Dogs - Plos Genetics January 16, 2014
