AFP / Washington
Humans can have domesticated dogs twice separated, the taming wolves both in Europe and in Asia thousands of years ago, according to a new research published yesterday.
A large international research project may have clarified some of the deep controversies surrounding the origins of man’s best friend, which until now remained a mystery with two main hypotheses.
The first holds that humans domesticated dogs for the first time in Europe more than 15,000 years ago.
But other researchers believe that domestication began about 12,500 years ago in Central Asia or China.
The new study, published in the journal Science specializing in US, suggests that both views can have weight.
“Perhaps the reason there has been no consensus on where they were domesticated dogs because all have had some reason,” said Greg Larson, a prominent researcher at the University of Oxford he helped lead this ambitious project.
The scientists used for this purpose, evidence of ancient DNA and archaeological records of primitive species of dogs in their research.
The project involved first sequencing the genome of a dog 4,800 years old at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland.
the bones of this dog came from neolithic passage tomb of Newgrange, Ireland, contemporary to the ruins of Stonehenge in England.
the British team also used mitochondrial DNA of 59 old dogs that lived between 14,000 and 3,000 years ago, and compared it with samples of genetic attributes of more than 2,500 modern dogs.
immigration Synthesis
These findings suggest that dogs were domesticated separately in Europe and Asia, and then mixed during migrations across the continent.
This would mean that most dogs today have a genetic mix of its European and Asian ancestry.
The new hypothesis would explain in part why scientists have had so much work interpreting previous genetic studies. “The new model is provocative and exciting,” said John Novembre, a geneticist population of the University of Chicago.
“The full cooperation will be essential to unravel this complicated story.”
The theory of dual origin could also suggest that cats and pigs were domesticated several times, said Peter Savolainen, a geneticist at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. “If domestication occurred only in one place, it was probably a very difficult thing to do,” he said. “But if it happened twice, may not have been as difficult as we thought,” said Peter Savolainen.
canine World
- Oman Installed on a hill on the outskirts of Muscat, capital of the sultanate of Oman, a hotel and a nursing welcome new customers, dogs, signs of a certain evolution of mentalities in the Arab world towards these animals more often treated as plague victims.
- Brazil Police dogs are used to detect drugs explosives, but with the Olympics just around the corner are being trained hard to warn of potential terrorist threats.
- US A genetic mutation appears to cause certain dogs like the Labrador Retriever is extremely obsessed with food and treats.
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