Dogs can trace their origin to a single lost population of wolves

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Genomics researcher Anders Bergstrom and his colleagues recently sequenced the genomes of 27 dogs from archaeological sites scattered around Europe and Asia, ranging from 4,000 to 11,000 years old. Those genomes, along with those of modern dogs and wolves, show how dogs have moved around the world with people since their domestication.

All the dogs in the study descended from the same common ancestor, but that original dog population split into at least five branches as it expanded in different directions. As groups of people split apart, migrated, and met other groups, they brought their dogs along. Dog DNA suggests that their population history mirrors the story of human populations, for the most part.

“Understanding the history of dogs teaches us not just about their history, but also about our history,” said Bergstrom, of the Francis Crick Institute, in a statement.

Ancient human DNA tells us that early farmers from what is now Turkey moved north and west into Europe around 8,000 years ago, and it took just a few centuries for them to completely replace the populations of hunter-gatherers who were already there. [...]

And DNA from ancient European dogs tells us that very similar things were happening between the Neolithic newcomers’ dogs and the ones (like the 11,000-year-old Swedish dog mentioned above) that were already there.

In general, dogs found at archaeological sites in north and western Europe have more eastern ancestry, and less Levantine ancestry, than dogs found in the south and east—and vice versa.

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