China News Service, Beijing, June 30 (Reporter Sun Zifa) Where are the ancestors of dogs?
A genome analysis of ancient wolves in Europe, Siberia, and North America over the past 100,000 years shows that dogs are more closely related to ancient wolves in eastern Eurasia than dogs. Ancient wolves in western Eurasia are more closely related.
In this new study, the researchers found that dogs in the Near East and Africa have the potential for independent domestication or co-breeding with native wolves, meaning dogs may have a double ancestor.
In addition, the researchers identified natural selection that occurred in the late Pleistocene (about 129,000 to 11,700 years ago).
Gray wolves were the first species to produce a domesticated population, the paper says, and spread across nearly the entire northern hemisphere during the last glacial period, during which many other large mammals went extinct.
While it is known that dogs originated from gray wolves, the jury is still out on when, where and how this happened.
To elucidate this history, the co-corresponding authors of the paper, Pontus Skoglund and Anders Bergstrom of the Francis Crick Institute in the United Kingdom, and their multinational counterparts, 66 new ancient wolf genomes were sequenced in Europe, Siberia, and northwestern America, in addition to 5 previously sequenced ancient wolf genomes and 1 ancient jackal from the Caucasus (from Central Asia, South Asia, East Asia, Southeast Asia A wild dog) genomes that span the past 100,000 years.
They found genetic relatedness among wolf populations throughout the Late Pleistocene, likely because these wolves were able to move around in open environments.
This genetic relatedness between wolf populations allowed the researchers to identify natural selection, to be precise, that mutations in the gene IFT88, code-named IFT88, began 40,000 to 30,000 years ago that may have helped the species survive.
It is unclear which traits of the IFT88 gene confer this survival advantage.
The authors also found that one species related to eastern Eurasia appears to have contributed nearly 100 percent of the ancestry of early dogs in Siberia, America, East Asia and Europe.
But at the same time, they also found that nearly half of dogs in the Near East and Africa came from a different population related to modern wolves in southwestern Eurasia, suggesting the possibility of independent domestication or co-breeding with native wolves .
Furthermore, none of the genomes in the analysis matched directly to the ancestral existence of these dogs.
The authors of the paper say that future studies of ancient wolf genomes from other parts of the world are still needed to further identify the ancestors of modern dogs.
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