http://www.sci-news.com/biology/gray-wo ... 10950.html
The gray wolf was the first species to give rise to a domestic population and was present across most of the northern hemisphere throughout the Ice Age when many other large mammals went extinct.
Although it is clear that dogs came from gray wolves, there is no consensus regarding when, where and how this happened.
To elucidate this history, Francis Crick Institute researcher Pontus Skoglund and colleagues sequenced 66 new ancient wolf genomes from Europe, Siberia and north-western North America.
They also incorporated five previously sequenced ancient wolf genomes and increased coverage for one.
Additionally, they sequenced the genome of an ancient dhole from the Caucasus, contextually dated to over 70,000 years ago, to serve as an outgroup.
The scientists found that wolf populations were genetically connected throughout the Late Pleistocene, which was likely due to the wolves’ ability to move across an open landscape.
This connectedness among the wolf populations allowed the authors to identify natural selection, specifically the rise of mutations in a gene called IFT88 between 40,000 and 30,000 years ago, which may have contributed to the survival of the species.
The traits from IFT88 responsible for this survival advantage remain unclear.
The authors found an eastern Eurasian-related species that appears to have contributed to around 100% of the ancestry of early dogs in Siberia, the Americas, East Asia and Europe.
“We show that dogs are overall more closely related to ancient wolves from eastern Eurasia than to those from western Eurasia, suggesting a domestication process in the east,” they said.
“However, we also found that dogs in the Near East and Africa derive up to half of their ancestry from a distinct population related to modern southwest Eurasian wolves, reflecting either an independent domestication process or admixture from local wolves.”
“None of the analyzed ancient wolf genomes is a direct match for either of these dog ancestries, meaning that the exact progenitor populations remain to be located.”
The study appears today in the journal Nature.