Dogs Have Been Man's Best Friend for Nearly 35,000 Years, More Than Previously Thought

By Staff Reporter - 21 May '15 12:51PM

New DNA evidence suggests humans and dogs have been best friends for much longer than previously thought.

Genetic information from a 35,000-year-old wolf bone found below a frozen cliff in Siberia reveals canine domestication occurred early on. It also suggests that dogs split from wolves as many as 27,000 to 40,000 years ago -- not 11,000 to 16,000 years ago, as earlier genome research had proposed.

"Dogs may have been domesticated much earlier than is generally believed," Love Dalen, a researcher at the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm and coauthor of a study describing the discovery in the journal Current Biology, said in a statement.

This animal, the Taimyr wolf of Siberia, is the most recent common ancestor of modern wolves and dogs.

"We find that the ancestors of domestic dogs must have separated from the ancestors of wolves at least 27,000 years ago," lead author Pontus Skoglund, a Harvard University geneticist, according to Discovery News.

"As for the genetic link between the 35,000-year-old wolf and Husky-type dogs, the most natural explanation is that these dog breeds absorbed local wolf ancestry that still lived on in Siberia when they followed early human groups to this region," he said. "This is the first direct evidence we have that the diversity in common dog breeds today has such deep roots."

"The difference between the earlier genetic studies and ours is that we can calibrate the rate of evolutionary change in dog and wolf genomes directly, and we find that the first separation of dog ancestors must have been in the older range," Harvard Medical School geneticist Pontus Skoglund added.

"I think one of the simplest explanations is that hunter-gatherers may have caught wolf pups, which is extremely easy to do, and kept them in captivity as sentinels against the large predators that roamed the landscapes of the last Ice Age - bears, cave lions, etc. as well as other dangerous mammals - mammoths, woolly rhinos, other humans," Dalén said.