FLICKR, DREW AVERYUniversity of Chicago geneticist John Novembre and an international team of researchers decided to sequence and compare the full genomes of three gray wolves from three diverse locations—China, Croatia, and Israel—with an African basenji, an Australian dingo, and a Boxer to see which lineage or lineages had given rise to domestic dogs. But instead, the results suggested that rather than evolving directly from any of these wolf species, modern dogs split from an ancestral species that also gave rise to modern wolves, though no longer exists.
The study, published yesterday (January 16) in PLOS Genetics, comes hot on the heels of November 2013 Science paper that analyzed mitochondrial DNA from 18 fossil canine species, 49 modern wolves, and 77 modern dogs and came to a very similar conclusion: modern dogs evolved from a wolf species that is now extinct.
The new analysis found that of the six species examined, the three wolves were more closely related to each other than to any of the dogs, and vice versa. “The dogs all form one group, and the wolves all form one group, and there’s no wolf that these dogs are more closely related to of the three that we sampled,” Novembre told HuffPost Science. “That’s the big surprise of the study.”
The ...
