After all, modern dogs will descend not just from one population of wolves, but from two distinct populations, concludes a new study that analyzed DNA samples from prehistoric wolves and dogs thousands of years old.
Dogs are believed to be descended from Eurasian gray wolves, Canis lupus lupus — and, until recently, the population of this species that inhabited Europe was said to be the closest to living dogs. However, the closest population of wolves to most dogs appears to have inhabited Asia..
Anders Bergstrom, of the Francis Crick Institute in London, and one of the study’s authors, explained to NewScientist that the team couldn’t find an ancestral wolf that was directly related to the modern dog, they only realized that our four-legged dog . the companions are genetically more similar to ancient wolves that inhabited Asia than to European wolves.
There are many places on the map that we don’t have samples of. [de ADN]Anders Bergstrom explained. The researcher believes that the direct ancestor of dogs is found somewhere on the Asian continent, “a place from which we still have no samples.”
The new study, published in the scientific journal nature this Wednesday, came to solidify previous studies that account for a double lineage of wolves in the formation of modern dogs. Thousand-year-old canids discovered in Israel and Africa will have European wolves as their closest ancestral relative. Dogs discovered in Siberia, North America and Europe will be closer to Asian wolves.
For the researcher, these data seem to point to a distinct domestication of ancestral dogs in the east and west, and that only later the two were genetically interbred. Another hypothesis is that The four-legged animals were first domesticated in Asia and later mated with wolves from western regions..
The oldest dog with this double lineage was discovered in Israel, and is about 7,000 years old, although Bergstrom admits that the double cross may have occurred about 15,000 years ago.
Source: Observadora
