Ancient DNA analysis has revealed that The dog has been “man’s faithful friend” for at least 10,000 years: It accompanied him on his intercontinental migrations and that gave rise to a great physical diversity of dogs from those dates.
Two investigations published this Thursday in the journal Science, one of them with Spanish participation, confirm, on the one hand, that Domestic dogs used to travel alongside humans and integrated into their societies since the Holoceneand on the other, that dogs began to diversify physically before humans began to breed modern breeds.
A new genomic study has shown that dogs travel with human groups that migrated and settled in different parts of Europe, Asia and the Arctic for at least more than 10,000 years, and were sometimes exchanged between populations.
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To reach this conclusion, the researchers sequenced 17 genomes of ancient dogs (between 9,700 and 870 years ago) from sites in Siberia, the central Eurasian steppe and northwest China, regions that experienced important changes during the rise of human culture in the Holocene.
The authors compared that data to 57 previously published ancient dog genomes, 160 modern dog genomes, and 18 ancient human genomes, allowing them to study how ancient dog lineages intersected with human migrations and cultural exchanges.
The findings show that the movement of domestic dogs across the Eurasian steppe, eastern Asia and Siberia often coincided with the migrations of hunter-gatherers, farmers and herders, and that communities with different ancestry may have exchanged dogs with each other.
Diverse since ancient times
The other study, in which researchers from the Autonomous University of Barcelona, the University of Murcia and the Catalan Institute of Classical Archeology, all in Spain, participated, confirms that The physical diversity of dogs has existed for more than 10,000 years, and is not the result of intense selective breeding that has taken place in the last 200 years, as has sometimes been thought.
To track how the physical forms of domestic dogs developed and diversified over time, the researchers did 3D morphometric analysis to examine 643 canid skulls spanning 50,000 years.
By creating 3D digital models, using laser scanning or photogrammetry, they compared specific cranial features between ancient and modern dogs and their wild relatives.
The results show that distinctive dog skull features first appeared during the early Holocene, as demonstrated by 10,800-year-old remains recovered in Russia.
The oldest known dogs from the Mesolithic and Neolithic had skulls that were within the range of modern sizes.but they were typically smaller and less varied, lacking the exaggerated traits that characterize many current breeds.
Still, their diversity was surprising. Early Holocene dogs exhibited about half the morphological range seen in modern dogs and twice as much as their Pleistocene wolf ancestors, suggesting that notable variation in dog form had already emerged millennia before modern breeding practices.