The phrase
"dog domestication" refers to the process of humans taming and training dogs to live and work with them. It means taking wild dogs and turning them into pets or companions that can live and cooperate with humans.
Full definition
The origin
of dog domestication in Europe with Robert Wayne; Richard Lenski tracks the adaptation of bacteria over 50,000 generations; Robert Services describes the prospects of a new contender in solar technology.
«Our working hypothesis is that dogs and humans probably evolved some of these skills as a result of similar evolutionary processes, so probably some things that happened in human evolution were very similar to processes that happened
in dog domestication,» MacLean said.
Research reported by Larson and colleagues last year in Science suggests that
dog domestication happened at least twice, once in Europe and once in East Asia (SN: 7/9/16, p. 15).
«[It's] a truly novel paper from many different perspectives, and perhaps not surprisingly, a novel result as well,» says Greger Larson, an evolutionary biologist and
dog domestication expert at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, who was not involved with the work.
Recent genetic studies have placed ground zero
for dog domestication in Europe, Central Asia, the Middle East, South Asia or Southeast Asia.
Although neither Wayne nor Savolainen were involved in the current study, both joined Larson in 2013 as part of an international collaboration to solve the mystery of
dog domestication once and for all.
That's the task of paleontologist Mietje Germonpré of the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels, who
studies dog domestication.
The scholarly work
on dog domestication is quite voluminous; below are listed a few of the most recent studies.
The foxes she worked with come from a long line started in 1959 when a Russian scientist named Dmitry Belyaev attempted to
recreate dog domestication, but using foxes instead of wolves.
At 36,000 years old, the Goyet pooch
pushed dog domestication back to well before glaciers reached their peak coverage of the Northern Hemisphere.
But last year a study published in Science made the argument that
dog domestication actually occurred twice: once in Europe and once in Asia.
Paper (s) cited: Axelsson E et al. «The genomic signature of
dog domestication reveals adaptation to a starch - rich diet» Nature, Online January 23, 2013, DOI: 10.1038 / nature11837
This lineage traveled from the site
of dog domestication in Central Asia to Europe along with an early dog expansion perhaps 10,000 years ago.
«Nothing ever seals the deal, but this is pretty strong evidence
for dog domestication in the Near East cultural region,» says Carlos Driscoll, a geneticist at
In a paper published this week in Nature Communications Krishna Veeramah at Stony Brook University and colleagues argue that
dog domestication occurred once, sometime between 20,000 and 40,000 years ago.
«
Dog domestication may have increased harmful genetic changes, biologists report.»
Wolves and dogs that are friendliest to people carry mutations in genes with links to sociability, backing the idea that this was key in dog domestication
Robert Wayne, an evolutionary biologist and
dog domestication expert at the University of California, Los Angeles, is also skeptical: One lesson learned from genetic studies of dog domestication is that looking at dogs living today «are a poor guide to domestication events which may have occurred more than 27,000 years ago.»
«We need to reconsider how we think of
dog domestication,» says Losey.
The new evidence raises the possibility that
dog domestication is quite ancient, corresponding roughly in time to the Neandertal extinction.
The work could rewrite the thinking about some of the earliest days of
dog domestication, and it suggests that scientists interested in the beginnings of the human - canine relationship should be paying more attention to early Arctic peoples.
Adam Freedman of Harvard University and an international group of collaborators compared DNA from three breeds of dogs (a boxer, a Basenji and an Australian dingo) to that of three gray wolves (Canis lupus) from Croatia, China and Israel — three locations proposed as centers of
dog domestication.
Online News Editor David Grimm talks with Sarah Crespi about reporting on this story and what it says about the history of
dog domestication.
Coupled with
the dog domestication bottleneck, this likely simplified the genetic architecture of quantitative traits, including complex disease phenotypes that are not fixed within breeds and were not the subject of selection for novelty.
It's too soon to know just how important the genes identified in the study were in
dog domestication, cautioned Ray Coppinger, during an interview with Inside Science.
The findings are consistent with current theories of
dog domestication.
Some analyses suggest that the original domestication location of
dog domestication was in East Asia; others that the middle east was the original location of domestication; and still others that a later domestication took place in Europe.
The history of
dog domestication is that of an ancient partnership between dogs (Canis lupus familiaris) and humans.
I'm not sure about the precise dating but it is plausible that goat / sheep herding and
dog domestication may have occurred much earlier than thought.
He thinks that they may hold the secret to the origins of
dog domestication.
The exact date of
dog domestication is not known, but some experts like University of Liverpool's Keith Dobney, an archeologist, says that it could date back to over 30,000 years.
«Chinese indigenous dogs might represent the missing link in
dog domestication,» the researchers write in the paper.