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
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