Sled dogs have been helping humans for 10k years, study shows

June 26, 2020

Greenland sled dogs, a fluffy, curly-tailed canine native to the Arctic tundra, could be the oldest dog breed, according to the first study to take a deep dive into the animals’ genetic history. The sled dog branch of the family tree, which includes huskies and malamutes, broke off from the rest of the dogs around 9,500 years ago.

Scientists know that dogs likely evolved from Eurasian wolves, but exactly when or where that transformation took place is a matter of mystery. To better understand the genetics of sled dogs and their place in the world, scientists sequenced the genome of a dog from Siberia’s Zhokhov archaeological site, dating to around 9,500 years ago.

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“I was actually anticipating that we would find some sort of precursor of domestic dogs,” says lead author Mikkel-Holger Sinding, a Ph.D. student at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark.

Instead, he and his colleagues found today’s sled dogs and the Zhokhov dog descended from the same branch. “It means that all dogs must have diversified earlier than this,” he says.

“One of the biggest differences between a brown bear and a polar bear is that the polar bear has a specific genetic adaptation for eating lots of blubber. And we see almost precisely the same solution in ogs,” Sinding says. Another mutation allows sled dogs to highly regulate body temperatures, says Ostrander.