Wolf to Dog: Scientists Agree on How, but Not Where [View all]

[jtuck004]

Where did dogs come from? That simple question is the subject of a scientific debate right now. In May, a team of scientists published a study pointing to East Asia as the place where dogs evolved from wolves. Now, another group of researchers has announced that dogs evolved several thousand miles to the west, in Europe. This controversy is intriguing even if you’re not a dog lover. It illuminates the challenges scientists face as they excavate the history of any species from its DNA.
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Now Dr. Wayne and his colleagues are introducing a new line of evidence to the dog debate: ancient DNA. Over the past two decades, scientists have developed increasingly powerful tools to rescue fragments of DNA from fossils, producing “an explosion in the samples,” said Beth Shapiro of the University of California, Santa Cruz, a collaborator with Dr. Wayne.
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The scientists did not find that living dogs were closely related to wolves from the Middle East or China. Instead, their closest relatives were ancient dogs and wolves from Europe. “It’s a simple story, and the story is they were domesticated in Europe,” Dr. Shapiro said. But Dr. Savolainen said the analysis was flawed. “It’s not a correct scientific study, because it’s geographically biased,” he said.
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Dr. Wayne is not quite so pessimistic. He and his colleagues are hoping to widen their scope and find more DNA from fossils of dogs outside of Europe, while also looking at the genes of living dogs that might hold important clues. Yet he thinks it unlikely that the new evidence will change the basic conclusion of his latest study. “But there have been so many surprises in the history of this research on dog domestication that I’m holding my breath till we get more information,” Dr. Wayne said.

Here.

According to this dogs evolved back when the hunters were taking game in Europe, and the killings left a lot of food on the table for wolves to subsist on. Eventually they became separated and domesticated by the hunters. But it could have happened in China...

I wonder what the odds are that it happened in both places? I have an English Setter, and what we guess might be a Korean Jindo mix. And they look at the world from completely different perspectives, I think. And the Anatolian combines behaviors of both of them.