PIXABAY, POHJAKROONAn international group of researchers analyzed a series of dog and wolf genomes and concluded that the domesticated canines diverged from a population of wolves in Southeast Asia 33,000 years ago. The results were published this week (December 15) in Cell Research.
The sample population consisted of 12 grey wolves, 12 indigenous dogs from northern China, 11 dogs from Southeast Asia, four Nigerian village dogs, and 19 domestic dogs from Asia, Europe, and the Americas. The dogs from Southeast Asia were most diverse, indicating that there was no bottleneck caused by a small migrating population colonizing the area; these dogs were also most closely related to the grey wolves.
“We find that dogs from southern East Asia have the same DNA types that are found in dogs all over the world, but also unique types that we don't see anywhere else,” study coauthor Peter Savolainen, an evolutionary geneticist at the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, told the Los Angeles Times.
When the researchers examined the migration ...
