Mystery Solved: Where Did Dogs Originate From?

Only a few animals have been able to make friends with us humans so far. This short list includes cats, dogs, horses, cows, sheep, goats, water buffalo, and a few others. The rest of them end up being chased, scared, hiding, and even hunted down by humans. One of the earliest pet animals man ever had is the dog. It is an integral part of human societies due to its multiple capabilities as a hunter, shepherd, racer, beauty animal, etc. But one would think: Where does this animal come from? And how does it become our close friend?

Well, this mystery has now been solved by biologists and we now know the whereabouts of our best animal friend. There is a general agreement among the researchers that modern-day dogs (Canis Familiaris) have evolved from grey wolves (Canis Lupus). This occurred during the last ice age at least 15,000-30,000 years ago. 

The humans of the old era living in caves and huts spent their lives as nomadic people and ate the wild fruits and meat of animals they hunted down. Living in the caves and often in the forests, they co-existed with the wild animals. One of those wild animals were the sharp, swift, and intelligent looking animal species: Canis lupus, the wolves. But some of them were tamed as compared to their fellow wolves, they got attracted towards human residencies, got the opportunity to feed over the scraps and leftovers of humans, started living near them, and ultimately became attached to human communities. Our ancestors started getting benefits from these early wolves. As they live near humans, these abstained other wild animals to come near their young ones and as a result, human communities started being guarded by the early wolves. It was a mutually beneficial relationship as humans were getting protection and the wolves were getting food in return. As those tamed wolves reproduced, they passed their traits to the next generations and by almost 16,700 years ago these animals lost their wild traits and became fully domesticated and contributing members of human societies. The complete process of domestication had been completed in multiple stages. The earlier stages included natural selection and artificial selection. In natural selection, only those tamed ancient wolves survived and reproduced, who had a particular feeding behavior in that specific ecological niche, that was created by the activity of humans. Artificial selection was done by our ancestors in which they bred those dogs who had a specific ability to carry out a particular job. They tamed and bred those dogs according to their domestic needs. 

Earlier dogs helped humans in hunting and agriculture but humans have bred the dogs according to their needs and today we have a variety of dogs, each of different colors, shapes, and sizes. Pointer dogs with an efficient sense of smell helped them to catch and hunt birds, the larger and stronger dogs like Siberian husky and Alaskan Malamute were bred to pull the sled on ice, and the even bigger dogs were bred on the North pole near Siberia approximately 900 years ago to hunt the polar bears and the turnspit dog or vernepator cur (Latin) had been bred specifically to run in a wheel that turned a roasting spit in cavernous kitchen fireplaces in 16th century Britain. Most of the breeds of modern-day dogs are bred within the last 400 years only.

Now another question was disturbing the biologists around the world, where exactly this domestication process of dogs kicked off? Earlier it was concluded that it might have happened in Europe, the Middle East, Somewhere in Asia, or probably in more than one location. A new and relatively clearer answer to this question has been given in the latest research published on June 29, 2022, in Nature. In this research, more than 80 researchers from 16 different countries participated. They analyzed 72 genomes of ancient wolves that lived about 100,000 years back in Siberia, Europe, and North America. Despite analyzing and studying these genomes, the researchers could not find a singular ancient wolf that is directly related to all the modern dogs present today. But they did come out with the fact that the dogs of today are more genetically similar to the ancient wolves from Asia as compared to the ones that were present in Europe. This shows that the domestication process of dogs is more likely to have happened somewhere in Asia.

Now the researchers would need more genomes from the ancient wolves from the southern hemisphere particularly Asia to find a direct linkage of modern-day dogs with the ancient wolves but this would be a hard job because DNA is best preserved in the permafrost and colder climates of the Northern hemisphere. If they succeed in this job, more interesting discoveries will be made and we will get more to know about the history of our best animal friend, Canis familiaris-The dog.