This implies that all modern dogs, as well as the Newgrange canine, can trace their ancestry back to Asia. What’s more, a movement from East to West would have left a timeline of dog fossils scattered in the geographic area in the middle.
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At some point after their domestication, the eastern dogs dispersed with migrating humans into Europe where they mixed with and mostly replaced the earliest European dogs.
At last, scientists are beginning to put together a coherent timeline of dog domestication, says co-author Keith Dobney from Liverpool University’s Department of Archaeology, Classics and Egyptology.
The remains of a 4,800 year old dog found in Newgrange, Co Meath, are at the centre of a new theory on the origin of man’s best friend. It also appears that there was a dramatic population turnover event in Europe, one that effectively replaced the earliest domesticated dog populations living there. The only animal known to have been domesticated twice is the pig, in both east Asia and the near East. The same story might be true for Rover and Fido.
Dogs were some of the first animals that humans domesticated. “Most animals were domesticated once from a single wild population, and what we have now is what we believe to be the first evidence both genetically and archaeologically were in fact domesticated two times”, senior author Professor Greger Larson has said.
Now, a new genetic study of hundreds of canines could help explain the discrepancies in the results of these studies as it has found evidence suggesting that dogs may have been domesticated not just once but on at least two occasions in two different parts of the world.
Some have pointed to Europe and others to central Asia or China, but up until now it was thought the transformation of wolves into domestic dogs only happened once.
“We were slightly surprised”, Dr. Laurent Frantz, the study’s lead author, told the Associated Press.
One argument to bolster the team’s hypothesis is a lack of archaeological evidence for ancient dogs in between Western Eurasia and East Asia.
Bradley and his team now suggest that dogs were first domesticated from geographically separated (now extinct) wolf populations on opposite sides of the Eurasian continent.
Bradley and his team can sequence nearly the entire DNA genome of something that died thousands of years ago by simply using its ear – the petrous bone, to be precise. Even though both groups had a common ancestor between 14,000 and 6,500 years ago, the authors found that two different populations of dogs lived in both territories during the Paleolithic. The group began by sequencing DNA from ancient and modern dogs to measure genetic drift.
Thousands of ancient dogs and wolves will be analysed to test this new perspective and establish the timing and location of the history of our oldest pet. Another good idea would be to do a comparative analysis of ancient dogs with the Australian dingo, which is likely descended from East Asian dogs.
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But according to new research, cited on csmonitor.com, the process may have occurred in more than one area of the world, based on fossil evidence and new DNA investigations.
