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New Data Fuels Dogfight Over the Origins of Domestic Dogs

by Elizabeth Pennisi

Most researchers agree that dogs descend from wolves, but they fiercely debate when and where humans and canines first became best friends. In the latest volley, two new studies place dog domestication in southern China, south of the Yangtze River, some 16,000 years ago. That location contradicts results published last year suggesting that dogs come from the Middle East, but the new work is far from the final word, according to many dog-origins experts.

“I’m not convinced,” says Greger Larson, an evolutionary biologist at Durham University in the United Kingdom.

Because archaeologists have trouble telling wolf remains from dog remains, the fossil record has not been very useful for reconstructing canine history. So in the past decade, geneticists have turned to DNA for clues. In 2002, geneticist Peter Savolainen of the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Ya-ping Zhang of the Kunming Institute of Zoology in China, and colleagues analyzed mitochondrial DNA, which is passed down through females, from 38 wolves and more than 500 dogs around the world. They found the full range of genetic diversity—a marker of a species’ origin—in southern East Asia and only subsets of that diversity elsewhere. They conclude that dogs were domesticated in East Asia, and just once.

But a 2010 study looking at single base differences throughout dogs’ nuclear DNA called the East Asian origin into question, pointing instead to the Middle East as the home of the first Fidos. Savolainen faulted that analysis, however, because it didn’t include data from southern East Asia…

(read more: Science NOW)    

(photo: Farm puppies from SW China, by Ya-ping Zhang)