The history of human domestication of the dog was confused than thought – Moskovsky Komsomolets

man’s best friend became former Wolves at least twice

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A team of researchers, representing the University of Oxford, came to the conclusion that it is not the modern dogs are descendants of one, and at least two groups of wolves tamed that people in different parts of Eurasia independently. Previously it was thought that the man made the dog his best friend only once, although the question of where it happened, and put many professionals to a standstill.

Photo: Gennady Cherkasov

The dog became another person, at least 15 thousand years ago, that is, for several millennia before humans first brought cows, goats and pigs . However, many questions otnostielno of how the ancient people, and some of the ancient wolves came to the mutually beneficial cooperation, to a large extent remains a mystery. The probability of such an alliance has long been considered so low that experts, for the most part, believed that the domesticated dog only once, and then the descendants of the first hand-held dogs spread around the world. To test whether this assumption, the experts examined the genetic material of the inner ear of the dog, 4.8 thousand years ago lived on the territory of Ireland. The results are then compared with the data obtained in the study of sequences of mitochondrial DNA of 59 ancient dogs from other parts of Europe as well as in the analysis of the genome of modern dogs.

The study showed, for the first time humans domesticated dogs in Western Eurasia, and after a few thousands of years, their tamed and in the east of the Old World, with both episodes occurred independently of each other. In the central part of Eurasia such episodes, apparently, it did not happen. To date, according to scientists, is dominated by a dog “Asian” in the world, largely supplanted «Europeans».

According to the researchers, their work, published in the journal Science, suggests that domestication animals throughout human history could occur significantly more often than expected for today.

In this case, experts stress that the domestication of the dogs had to be very complex and multi-step process. According to researchers, it is unlikely people simply caught wild wolves, and brought them, making obedient generation after generation. Most likely, originally themselves wolves began to settle closer to the people, then the two types of gradually get used to each other, and only after there has been a kind of manifestation of initiative on the part of the people.