Dog breeds have been quite different for thousands of years

Since 11,000 years ago, in the early Holocene, the dog had a distinct skull shape, different from the wolf from which it descended. There is also a clear variation in size in different dog breeds. This is evident from a large comparison of more than six hundred prehistoric and modern dog and wolf skulls, about which a research team led by Allowen Evin (University of Montpellier) and Carly Ameen (University of Exeter) wrote this week. in Science.

In the first millennia after the Ice Age, the dog was already a trusted companion of humans, but it has long been thought that there was not much variation in dog breeds at that time. Because almost all current dog breeds are not older than a few hundred years. This large-scale comparison now shows that in the first millennia after the Ice Age, dog skulls already showed half of the current variety. But for example, extremely short snouts like today’s bulldogs or boxers and also the long and narrow snouts like greyhounds and Russian wolfhounds certainly did not occur in those old days.

This large variation in prehistoric dogs was already discovered a few years ago during research old dog jaws seen. The question now is how this variation arose. The researchers in Science themselves suspect that climate changes and the available food have influenced this early variation, but certainly also human selection. Dogs were probably used as guard and hunting dogs, and different types of dogs may have been selected for different uses.

But in an accompanying comment Science This week, Australian archaeologist Milanie Filios (University of New England, Armidale) writes that this variation in early dog ​​breeds could just as well be the result of a much longer-standing, ‘natural’ variation in the wolf population from which the dog emerged. That should have happened somewhere around 25,000 to 15,000 years ago, according to the most recent insights. The skull researchers now also write that a lot of research is still needed into the origin of the variation and the early dog ​​history. A problem in the study is not only the small number of dog and wolf skulls from the Ice Age, but also the fact that dogs most likely originated from a wolf population that subsequently became extinct.

Dogs were exchanged or traded

In the same issue of Science other researchers also publish an investigation to early dog ​​history. This specifically focuses on the question of whether the human groups that lived and traveled in Eurasia between 10,000 and 3,000 years ago brought their own dogs with them, or whether they adopted local dogs from other human groups. Careful analysis of human and dog genomes from that time shows that the genetic variation in humans and dogs tended to go together, so they generally stayed together. In that period, Paleo-Siberians and East Asians had dogs with a clear East Asian and Arctic signature, while Iranian farmers and herder groups on the western steppes had dogs with a Western origin.

But there were also exceptions. The more eastern hunter-gatherers of the Kazakh Botai culture (fourth millennium BC) and the much older Veretye ​​culture in northwestern Russia (tenth millennium BC) themselves have a clearly Western genetic culture, while their dogs had an East Asian genetic signature. A clear indication that dogs were also exchanged or traded with other groups, the researchers of this second study write. Science-research.

There are several hypotheses about how the dog was domesticated, sometime during the Ice Age. Wolf groups may have sought out people themselves in order to eat meat waste, after which most tame wolves became increasingly tolerated by people (for example because they appeared to warn of predators or other approaching danger). Another possibility is that it started because people adopted young wolf pups as a pastime, just as hunter-gatherers often take young animals from the forest, ‘for fun’.

A burial of an adult dog with a puppy together with a human, 15,000 years old in Oberkassel, Germany, is the oldest unmistakable indication of dog domestication. The oldest genetic evidence for the separation of domestic dogs from wild wolves is a dog genome from the Veretye ​​culture mentioned above, 11,000 years old from northwestern Russia.

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