Research on the history of dogs shows: the first domesticated wolves appeared in East Asia 15 thousand years ago
Dogs today come in all types and sizes, but scientists now believe that they evolved from a handful of wolves that were domesticated by humans in western China less than 15 years ago. It is also clear that 95 percent of today's dogs originate from three female founders.
A team of three researchers claims to have solved the puzzle in the evolution and social history of dogs. Their findings, reported at the end of the week in the journal Science, indicate the existence of the aforementioned possibility that three founding mothers called "farms" (plural of "farm") of the dog world.
They come to the conclusion that intensive controlled breeding by humans over the last 500 years and not different genetic sources is responsible for the huge diversity in the appearance of modern dogs. One of the studies looked at the old dogs and tried to trace their origin which was previously thought to be in the Middle East. Another team studied the dogs of the New World and found that there were none at all, and that they originated in East Asia, when they arrived on the continent with humans.
Carl Willa from the University of Uppsala in Sweden, one of the members of the team that examined the New World dogs said: "We found that dogs originated in the Old World and that they arrived together with humans. This is the proof that the humans changed the dogs." According to him, this is indeed the evolution of the cables but also the story of the development of modern man. He added that it is not known how or why humans domesticated dogs, but the speed with which they multiplied and diversified dogs indicates that dogs played an important role in human life.
"I suppose that if the dogs improved, for example, the quality of the hunt, it gave the humans an advantage. They made settling the New World easier.” It is possible that the dogs are responsible for the conquest of the entire world by humans.
Peter Sabulainen of the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm led the study that examined Old World dogs, examining DNA samples from dogs in Asia, Europe and the Arctic region of America. The team found that although most dogs shared the same genetic pool, the greatest genetic diversity was in East Asia, suggesting that dogs were domesticated there for the longest time.
Most of the assumptions until now were that the origin of the dogs was the Middle East, according to the facts that were known until now - a small number of archaeological evidence from the area and the fact that other animals were domesticated there," he said.
The researchers tested sequences from the dogs' mitochondrial DNA, which they inherit from their mothers. The findings show that most of today's dogs originated at a certain point in one gene pool. Matthew Binns, head of the Institute of Genetics at the Center for Animal Health in Newmarket, UK, says the findings are significant. "First of all, there is convincing evidence that really focuses on the date when the dog was domesticated and also the location of this domestication. And this is quite a surprise. It seems like 95 percent of today's dogs come from three mothers and I guess they would have been the mother farm of those dogs."
In a separate study, researchers from Harvard University and the Foundation for the Protection of Wolves, both in the USA, studied social recognition in dogs and were also surprised by the findings. In a simple experiment designed to compare their behavior with that of wolves and even if the closest species to humans - the chimpanzees. The findings show that dogs, even young puppies, are better at understanding social codes than humans.
A scientific explanation for the historical friendship: the dog understands man better
by Tamara Traubman
The well-known saying, according to which "the dog is man's best friend", was the focus of three new studies that provide explanations for the origins of the special relationship. From the research, which was published on Friday in the journal "Science", it appears, among other things, that the first dogs - which were actually captive wolves - appeared in East Asia 15 thousand years ago. Another finding, which may explain the friendship between man and dog, is that dogs excel at understanding the behavior of humans.
Most researchers believe that man domesticated the dog from wolves. Two of the research teams - who tried to trace the genetic origins of the dogs - tried to check when and where this process took place. One of the studies shows that individual wolves - possibly from a single population living in East Asia - are the ancestors of most of the dogs alive today.
The researchers, Dr. Petar Savolainen from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and his colleagues, studied DNA taken from several wolf populations and from 654 dogs, representing all the main dog breeds living in the world. They calculated and found that the most probable time when dogs began to be domesticated was about 15 thousand years ago.
Savolainen believes that the origin of the dogs is in East Asia, because there greater genetic variation was found between the dogs from Asia and Europe; This variation may show that dogs appeared in this area in earlier times than other areas.
Prof. Tamar Dayan, a zoologist and archaeologist from Tel Aviv University, points out that despite the new genetic findings, the most solid and earliest archaeological evidence for dogs is found precisely in Israel - in joint graves of dogs and humans from about 12 thousand years ago. According to her, "the earliest prehistoric dogs discovered in China belong to a significantly later period than the remains found in Israel." However, according to Savolainen, this may be due to the paucity of prehistoric research in China. According to him, it is possible that if more sites are excavated, the remains of dogs will also be discovered.
The second research group was led by Prof. Jennifer Leonard from the University of California in Los Angeles. According to her, when dogs evolved, humans quickly learned to live in cities and took them with them when they crossed the land bridge over the Bering Strait connecting Asia and North America. Leonard and her colleagues studied DNA from ancient dog bones found in Mexico, Peru and Bolivia. They found that the origin of all American dogs from the pre-Columbian period (before Columbus arrived in America), is in dogs from Europe and Asia.
"The result is interesting", says Dayan, "it shows the nature of the connections between the 'New World' (America - XNUMX) and the 'Old World', and shows that animals and humans really migrated together." According to her, the joint journey suggests that the relationship between the dog and the human may have been close and everyday.
Dayan notes that the dog was the first captive animal. The ancient hunter-gatherers domesticated the wolf and turned it into a dog, even before the invention of agriculture. Dayan says that the dog is also unusual among the other domesticated animals: while the others were domesticated to eat them, it seems that the dog helped the humans in hunting and guarding.
The third study investigated the psychology of the dogs, and showed that although the brain volume of the chimpanzees is larger, there is one task in which the dogs excel: understanding signals from human behavior. The researchers came to this conclusion after hiding food in boxes and letting dogs, wolves and monkeys try to find out where it was hidden with the help of clues (such as looking at the box containing the food). "This talent for interpreting human behavior," said the lead author of the study, Dr. Brian Hare from Harvard University, "is perhaps the ability why humans chose dogs."
