Hunting and Dogs: research has shown that the first dogs, of common origins to wolves, were domesticated and lived among the first men dedicated to hunting.
Dogs and wolves evolved from a common ancestor between 9.000 and 34.000 years ago, even before humans evolved into an agricultural society. And their DNA comes from areas of the world where the possibility of using them as pets is supposed to already have been known. This novelty dispels the popular myth built on the certainty that farmers were the first to tame wolves by turning them into dogs. Now genome analysis finds that the ancestors of dogs may have lived in a hunter-gatherer society and only later did they also adapt to agricultural life. This was revealed by a study by the Department of Human Genetics of the University of Chicago published in "Plos Genetics". Research shows that dogs, regardless of geographic origin, are more closely related to each other than wolves. This suggests that some of the genetic overlap seen today between certain breeds of dogs and wolves is the result of crossbreeding after the domestication of "four-legged friends", so not from a direct lineage to wolves.
"The domestication of dogs was a more complex phenomenon than we think - warns John Novembre, author of the study - in our analysis we did not find clear evidence in favor of a multi-regional model or an absolute origin from a race of wolves still alive ”.
20 January 2014
Source: Focus
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