Dog DNA study reveals the incredible journey of man's best friend

Interesting stuff.

Dog DNA study reveals the incredible journey of man's best friend

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“After evolving for several thousand years in east Asia, a subgroup of dogs radiated out of southern East Asia about 15,000 years ago to the Middle East, Africa as well as Europe. One of these out-of-Asia lineages then migrated back to northern China and made a series of admixtures with endemic east Asian lineages, before travelling to the Americas,” the scientists say.

Chances are, these migrations exactly mirror mankind's own.

NoCoPilot wrote:

Chances are, these migrations exactly mirror mankind's own.

Why would you think that? The animals were not domesticated. Purina was eons in the future.

Why?  Because the article mentions that dog domestication -- and human caninification -- probably dates to 30,000 years ago. This corresponds with the first dog skulls found in human habitations, shortly after CroMagnon displaced Neanderthals as the dominant humanoid species.

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33,000 years ago: oldest known domesticated dog skulls show they existed in both Europe and Siberia by this time.

How does a domesticated dog skull differ from the skull of a dog that was a snack?

It was in Europe and Siberia, not Korea.

I don't believe Europe, Siberia and Korea were defined back then. Nor, do I believe, was the concept of pets.

I also don't believe that early human-canine interaction was one of "pet" and "pet-owner" (note the order I used here). My suspicion, totally free of any scientific basis, is that men and dogs somehow got into hunting cooperatively -- the dogs would run down the prey, and man would kill it. Or man would bring down something big, and the dogs shared and protected the kill from scavengers. Dogs, as pack animals, are naturally prone to cooperation, coordination and sharing. It's a small leap to imagine mankind becoming honorary pack members, with our skill set, which complements canine capabilities, being very useful to the pack. IOW we were adopted as useful pets, and helped our packs become successful in their hunts.

It's not so much that dogs were domesticated, it's more that we were trained to work cooperatively with the pack for the common good. Three dog night.

That's a lovely sentiment, but I doubt that it's accurate.

I have no evidence, and have never read such a proposal, but it makes some kind of sense to me. The bond between man and dogs is too strong to be coincidental, and is old enough to have substantially affected the evolution of dogs.

It's only a small leap, a baby step really, to extrapolate that to mankind's own evolution too. In fact, it's gotten me to wondering if dogs are the reason CroMagnon displaces the more robust, stronger and apparently equally-smart Neanderthal.

Different article written about the same study mentions my hypothesis:

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In their paper, the scientists point out that there have been several reports of dog-like “canids” – the family that includes wolves and domestic dogs – up to 36,000 years old in the fossil record. There was also evidence that domesticated dogs may have accompanied early humans migrating from Asia to North America, possibly as long as 30,000 years ago.

Co-author Dr Pontus Skoglund, from Harvard Medical School, said: “The power of DNA can provide direct evidence that a Siberian husky you see walking down the street shares ancestry with a wolf that roamed northern Siberia 35,000 years ago. This wolf lived just a few thousand years after Neanderthals disappeared from Europe and modern humans started populating Europe and Asia.”

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