A new study suggests that although dogs and wolves share a common ancestor, dogs are more related to each other, regardless of geographical location.
John Novembre, lead author of the study and an associate professor in the Department of Human Genetics at the University of Chicago, concluded that the genetic overlap observed between the dogs and the wolves is a result of the early domestication of dogs rather than a direct line of descent from a group of wolves.
This contradicts the popular theory that early farmers adopted wolves as their companion and then these wolves evolved into the modern day dogs that we have today is wrong. Instead, what could have happened is that the earliest species of dogs have accustomed themselves to hunter-gatherer societies and became quickly adapted to the agricultural life.
For the study, the research team isolated the highest quality genome sequences generated from three species of gray wolves, one from Croatia, one from Israel, and one from China. These regions represent the areas where dogs are believed to first appear. After isolating the genome sequences, the researchers also generated genomes for two dog breeds; the basenji dog from Africa and the dingo dog from Australia. These regions are historically separated from modern wolf populations. In addition to the genomes of the dogs and wolves, the researchers also added the genome of jackals to represent the earliest difference between the three sets of genomes.
After the analysis, the researchers found out that the genomes of the basenji and dingo dogs are more closely related to each other. Similarly, the genomes of the wolves also resemble each other greatly even though they came from different geographic areas.
"One possibility is there may have been other wolf lineages that these dogs diverged from that then went extinct," Novembre said in a press release. "So now when you ask which wolves are dogs most closely related to, it's none of these three because these are wolves that diverged in the recent past. It's something more ancient that isn't well represented by today's wolves."
The study was published in the Jan. 16 issue of PLOS Genetics.
