* Astronomy

Blobrana · L

Canines

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RE: Domestic dogs

Blobrana · L

Study narrows origin of dogs

Dogs were domesticated between 9,000 and 34,000 years ago, suggesting the earliest dogs most likely arose when humans were still hunting and gathering before the advent of agriculture around 10,000 years ago, according to an analysis of individual genomes of modern dogs and gray wolves.
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Blobrana · L

Dog evolved 'on the waste dump'

A genetic study indicates the ability to thrive on the starchy food leftovers of early farmers was an important step in the domestication of dogs from wolves.
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Dogs' evolution shows why they 'love' gnawing on bones

Scientists have discovered why dogs love to eat meat and bones.
Living and hunting in groups coincided with a shift in dogs' diets, scientists analysing their ancestry found.
The animals adopted pack-living about eight million years ago in order to hunt larger prey, according to a team from the National University of Colombia.
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Dogs 'may have helped modern man to flourish over Neanderthals'

Our close friendship with dogs tipped the balance in favour of modern man over the Neanderthals, who had previously occupied present-day Europe for a staggering 250,000 years, an anthropologist has suggested.
Pat Shipman said that the advantages that domesticating a dog brought for us were so fundamental to our own evolution, that it made us 'top dog' out of the competing primate species.
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Genetic study confirms: First Dogs Came from East Asia

Researchers at Sweden's KTH Royal Institute of Technology say they have found further proof that the wolf ancestors of today's domesticated dogs can be traced to southern East Asia - findings that run counter to theories placing the cradle of the canine line in the Middle East.
Dr Peter Savolainen, KTH researcher in evolutionary genetics, says a new study released Nov. 23 confirms that an Asian region south of the Yangtze River was the principal and probably sole region where wolves were domesticated by humans.
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A very well-preserved 33,000 year old canine skull from a cave in the Siberian Altai mountains shows some of the earliest evidence of dog domestication ever found.
But the specimen raises doubts about early man's loyalty to his new best friend as times got tough.
The findings come from a Russian-led international team of archaeologists.
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Nearly 10,000 years ago, man's best friend provided protection and companionship - and an occasional meal.
That's what researchers are saying after finding a bone fragment from what they are calling the earliest confirmed domesticated dog in the Americas.
University of Maine graduate student Samuel Belknap III came across the fragment while analysing a dried-out sample of human waste unearthed in southwest Texas in the 1970s. A carbon-dating test put the age of the bone at 9,400 years, and a DNA analysis confirmed it came from a dog - not a wolf, coyote or fox, Belknap said.
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Title: The IGF1 small dog haplotype is derived from Middle Eastern gray wolves
Authors: Melissa M. Gray, Nathan B. Sutter, Elaine A. Ostrander and Robert K. Wayne

We present DNA sequence data that confirms the absence of the derived small SNP allele in the intron 2 region of IGF1 in a large sample of grey wolves and further establishes the absence of a small dog associated SINE element in all wild canids and most large dog breeds. Grey wolf haplotypes from the Middle East have higher nucleotide diversity suggesting an origin there. Additionally, PCA and phylogenetic analyses suggests a closer kinship of the small domestic dog IGF1 haplotype with those from Middle Eastern grey wolves.

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