Researchers from the Francis Crick Institute in London have been able to link dogs to human history. The research team studied genomes of up to 27 ancient dog bones dug from various parts of the world.
They discovered that about 11,000 years ago, dogs started to diversify genetically. At the time, they were supposedly 5 significant lineages of dogs, according to the evidence discovered by the researchers.
Dogs Were the First Species to Be Domesticated
Dogs were perhaps the first animals to be domesticated and have stuck with humans even as lifestyles changed from hunting to the gathering of food to farming as well as city living.
Dogs have also been found in the Americas, Asia, and Europe in a pattern that is quite similar to precisely how humans mixed and moved.
According to a postdoc from the same institution, Anders Bergstrom, ancient dogs' history has been shaped primarily by human history.
It also somehow reflects when humans moved and how they would have brought their beloved canines with them. It is also evident that ancient humans found those old dogs to be incredibly useful.
According to the Bergstrom, there is evidence in the Arctic that sled dogs really emerged very early. And ancient people used these sled dogs for the specific purpose of sledding, even as far back as over 10,000 years ago.
A handful of modern-day breeds such as Australian Dingo or New Guinea Singing Dog, the African Basenji, etc. are very similar to at least one of 5 ancient dog lineages.
Most of the other contemporary dog breeds derive from European dogs that were predominantly present in the dog genomes.
Bergstrom also added that there was once a great diversity of dogs in Europe, as far back as 4,000 to 5,000 years ago.
However, it appears that at one time or the other, there was only a single population of dogs that expanded astronomically to replace every other population in Europe.
This is something that the researchers didn't predict and cannot easily be detected by the mere study of archeology.
But when the researchers looked closely at the DNA, they observed a particular diversity in the past that is not presently and adequately represented in modern-day dogs.
The astonishing results of the study were published in the Science journal.
Readers will find several maps of dog migrations that occurred over time when they looked at the paper titled 'Origins and genetic legacy of prehistoric dogs' by Anders Bergstrom et al.
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Researchers Fail to Understand How Dogs Spread Widely to Human Groups
According to Bergstrom, it appears that dogs spread much more widely and quicker than humans about 11,000 years ago.
This is something that the researchers do not really understand. No human migrations were detected at the time, which could have prompted the massive spreading of the ancient dog population.
But somehow, the dog population spread rather quickly to human groups all over the world because they were beneficial for early human hunter-gatherer communities or groups.
Humans have also proven to be relatively useful to dogs. It is believed that dogs ate only what humans did at the time since prehistoric Petcos did not exist.
When humans began farming activities, both species adapted quickly to digesting more grains. And soon enough, the number of copies of the starch-digesting gene in dogs and humans significantly increased in the generations that followed the invention of agriculture.
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