The domestication of man’s best friend began much earlier than estimated so far and dates back more than 27,000 years, according to a genetic analysis of a jaw fragment of a Siberian wolf 35,000 years ago .
Humans have domesticated dogs from 27000-40000 years ago, estimated the Swedish researchers, whose work was published today in the Current Biology journal.
The above estimates also based on DNA analysis suggested that the ancestors of modern dogs had diverged from wolves over 16,000 years ago after the last Ice Age.
The analysis of the genome of this ancient fragment of jaw, that evidence dating back 35,000 radiocarbon years ago, revealed that the dog Taimyr wolf represents the most recent common ancestor between wolves and modern dogs.
Thus, “the dogs might have been domesticated long before what is generally thought,” says Love Dalén, the Swedish Museum of Natural History and one of the lead authors of the study.
According to the expert, “the only other explanation is that greater divergence has occurred between two populations of wolves in this period and that one of these has led to the complete line of modern wolves.”
But this hypothesis is less probable as it would mean the extinction of another population of wolves in the wild. DNA analysis also shows that husky sled dogs currently in Siberia and Greenland has an unusually high number common to the old wolfhound Taimyr genes 35,000 years ago.
This kind “lived only a few thousand years after the disappearance of Neanderthal man in Europe and the emergence of modern humans in Europe and Asia,” say the researchers.
EFE
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