The dog is the oldest domestic animal in the service of man, but their genetic history has been relatively unknown due to the fact that the archaeological finds have been thin.
In a report presented in the scientific journal Science, a group of Swedish and international researchers examined the entire genome from 27 prehistoric dog skeletons, the oldest almost 11,000 years old.
Their genome has since been compared to modern dogs, wolves and jackals.
Older than expected
The results show that even at that time there were five different genetic types of dogs spread around the world.
This means that the domestic dog is significantly older than previously thought.
"Probably all living dogs now descend from a wolf that was domesticated about 20,000 years ago, in the middle of the height of the last ice age," says Pontus Skoglund, a geneticist at the Francis Crick Institute in London, and one of the authors.
No one knows where in the world the first wolf was domesticated.
The only thing the geneticists can say is that it belonged to a now extinct species, and that the people who adopted it lived as hunters and gatherers.
It was probably a difficult project, as it does not seem that any similar so-called domestication, that is, adaptation to humans through breeding, of wild wolves has been repeated later.
Trade in dogs?
The rest is a success story.
The dogs spread quickly around the world and soon appeared all over the world.
Sometimes you can see that the spread follows human migration, for example when the first dogs followed hunters from Siberia to America during the ice age.
In other cases, they seem to have traveled without any signs of migration.
- It is a mystery how it could happen, and it makes us ask questions about human activity during the Stone and Bronze Ages.
Maybe there was trade in dogs between groups of people, in the same way as with ceramics, for example, says Pontus Skoglund.
The World of Science on November 16 "How dogs conquered the world" is about the origin of dogs.