Where did the dog originate?

The domestic dog, or Canis lupus familiaris, seems to have arisen like species in Middle East, according to a recent study published in the magazine Nature.

Across the comparison of genomes originated from hundreds of dogs and wolves, the scientists concluded that the domestic dogs keep major genetic relation with the gray wolf of Middle East, and not so much with the species of the Far East and China, as it was thought till now.

The biologists used genetic information originated from 900 dogs of 85 different races, and more than 200 wild gray wolves of the whole world.

“What we find is much more coherent with the archaeological finds,” there says Robert Wayne, Teacher of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology of the University of California, and principally responsible for the study. “This is the same area where also the domestic cats originated, the agriculture, and the human sedentarismo.”, the scientist notices.

What says the archaeology on this matter? The most ancient canine remains found till now in Middle East go back to 13.000 years of antiquity. Although more ancient finds were discovered in Russia (15.000 years) and Europe (31.000 years).

These fossils demonstrate that the dog was "domesticated" by the man during the last stage of the Paleolithic, when Homo Sapiens was still nómade and milleniums were missing so that there were arising the big civilizations of Middle East that Wayne mentions.

The cats, on the other hand, yes seem to have been incorporated into the human life during the Neolithic one and the sedentarismo (the first feline fossils date of 9.500 years ago). But the dogs were domesticated a lot of time behind, in the same place where thousands of years later the first human civilizations arose: Middle East.

Sources:

• ScienceDaily
• “Genome-wide SNP and haplotype analyses reveal to rich history underlying dog domestication”. Nature, 2010

Surprise under the Antarctic ice

A team of investigation of the NASA was perforating a well of approximately 20 centimeters in diameter and 2 meters deep in the Antarctica.

They were hoping to observe the thickness of the Antarctic ice but, for his surprise, a small creature crossed swimming in front of the screen and immediately it settled on the cable of the video camera. Since it is possible to appreciate in the video, his form was alike that of a shrimp.

When they raised the video camera, there was also a long tentacle coiled in the cable, which the scientists awarded to a jellyfish, or to a similar animal.

“We were operating under the assumption of which there was nothing below,” there said the scientist of the NASA Robert Bindchandler, who will present tomorrow the initial discoveries, together with the video, to American Geophysical Union for a better analysis.

“Technically, it is not a shrimp, but a crustacean called Lysianassidae Amphipoda, which is vaguely related to the shrimp.”, the scientist detailed.

The surprising of the case is that he was not hoping to be any more than any microorganisms surviving so extreme environmental conditions. The video would reveal that the complex life can develop under the dark and frozen water. What is there then of the extreme and hostile places for the life in the Solar system, like Europe, the frozen moon of Jupiter?

The microbiologist Cynan Ellis-Evans, of British Antarctic Survey, catalogs to the find like schemer. “This is the first time that finds a form of complex life straight under the ice of an ambience subglacier”.

Skeptic on this matter, he thought the possibility that these swimming creatures should have come from another place and should not live permanently under the Antarctic ice.

Nevertheless, Kim, coauthor of the study, doubts it. The place excavated in the western Antarctica is to at least 19 kilometers of the open sea. Bindschadler excavated a small well with small water quantity. This means that it is improbable that the creatures have swum big distances and they were captured at random in this small area.

But if the found creatures were indigenous, it is necessary to wonder on what they might feed in these extreme conditions. While some microorganisms can develop chemically their own food in the ocean, the complex life (paradoxically), how the arthropods, they cannot.

“It is amazing to find a big mystery as this one in a planet where we think that we know everything”, Kim concludes.

Source: CBS News / Video: YouTube