Split Between Domesticated Dogs and Wolves Much Earlier Than Previously Thought

As long as there have been preserved written words, the close connection between the Goddess and dogs/canines has been recorded -- extremely ancient "legends" dating back to times thousands of years before written languages were invented to record them.  Similar connections exist between the Goddess and cats/felines and the Goddess and cows/bovines.  Somewhat later but still extremely ancient connections also exist between the Goddess and horses and the Goddess and birds. 

My fascination with the link between the Goddess and canines is not only related to my love for dogs, it is also rooted in the link of the Invisible Hand of the Goddess via dogs to ancient board games.  It therefore comes as no surprise to me that the boundaries of our understanding of the ancient link between womankind in particular, because it was most likely women who first domesticated canines, is being consistently pushed further and further back into "herstory" both by ongoing discoveries and re-examination and re-interpretation of earlier discoveries. 

Here's the latest, from the Science Section of The New York Times:

Family Tree of Dogs and Wolves Is Found to Split Earlier Than Thought

By JAMES GORMANMAY 21, 2015

The ancestors of modern wolves and dogs split into different evolutionary lineages 27,000 to 40,000 years ago, much earlier than some other research has suggested, scientists reported Thursday.

The new finding is based on a bone fragment found on the Taimyr Peninsula in Siberia several years ago. When scientists studied the bone and reconstructed its genome — the first time that had been done for an ancient wolf, or any kind of ancient carnivore — they found it was a new species that lived 35,000 years ago.

Based on the differences between the genome of the new species, called the Taimyr wolf, and the genomes of modern wolves and dogs, the researchers built a family tree that shows wolves and dogs splitting much earlier than the 11,000 to 16,000 years ago that a study in 2014 concluded.

Their study also gives some dog-park bragging rights to owners of Siberian huskies and Greenland sled dogs, which have inherited a portion of their genes from the Taimyr wolf.

The history of dogs is still murky, however, because it seems that different kinds of wolves and dogs have interbred at different times in different places over the past tens of thousands of years.

Love Dalen, of the Swedish Museum of Natural History and an author of the report in Current Biology, said that the simplest explanation for the new evidence “is that dogs were domesticated as much as 30,000 years ago.”

But, he said, the researchers’ work does not prove that this is what happened. Pontus Skoglund, a research fellow at Harvard University and the first author of the research paper, said, “We can’t just look at the DNA and say whether a canid was living with modern humans.”

Laurent Frantz, a researcher at Oxford who also studies canine evolution, said that he thought the work was “a great milestone in studying wolf populations,” although he said the timing of the domestication of dogs remained unclear.

The bone fragment was found by Dr. Dalen a few years ago when he was collecting fossils of ancient mammals on the Taimyr Peninsula. He said that for one unidentifiable fragment, he wrote in his field notebook, “Reindeer?”

But genetic tests showed that that fragment belonged to a wolf, and subsequent carbon dating put it around 35,000 years old. At that point, Dr. Dalen said, Dr. Skoglund suggested sequencing the genome.

As to the impact of the new research, Dr. Dalen said, “I think it would be presumptuous to assume that it would settle anything, given how contentious the field is.”

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Contentious indeed!  Only think what fields of inquiry this latest research might lead to -- for instance -- cross-cultural contact among previously allegedly "distinct and isolated" populations of human beings on a scale that many (most) experts would find hard to accept, allowing for the cross-breeding of various species of domesticated canines.  Of course, cross-cultural contact among allegedly isolated populations where their doggies are making whoopie with each other also suggests the possibility that humans may also have been taking advantage of the novelty of making whoopie with the visitors.  And then there is the issue of cross-cultural trade over seemingly impossible distances, which evidence suggests did take place.  Hmmm....

Intriguing Theory About How Domestication of Wolves by "Modern Humans" Led to Extinction of "Neanderthals"

A continuation of exploring evidence that canines may have been domesticated by people more than 40,000 years ago.

I like this hypothesis of what may have led to the eventual "extinction" of Neanderthal people. Of course, Neanderthals are not really extinct because their DNA continues to exist in our so-called "modern" human DNA -- some 3% to 4% of shared genetic material that we KNOW came from cross-breeding in some "modern" human populations but not others because not all of us share this DNA imprint.  If the DNA of Neanderthal continues to exist in so-called "modern" human beings, I don't think the Neanderthals are extinct at all, do you?

Regardless, it means that so-called "modern" man wasn't the blood-thirsty murdering bastard then that he has, some would have us believe, morphed into today.  I leave you to judge...

Here's the article -- sensationalized, of course, because it's from The Daily Mail, but they do have a way of making obscure scientific hypotheses easily accessible to anyone who bothers to read about them:

Always a man's best friend: Dogs bred from wolves helped humans take over from Neanderthal rivals in Europe 40,000 years ago

• Neanderthals were wiped out after ancient humans arrived from Africa
• Scientists disagree on why - but top anthropologist may have the answer
• Dr Pat Shipman said we paired up with wolves in symbiotic partnership
• Wolves cornered prey and humans made the kill, sharing meat afterwards
• Neanderthals were then 'no match' for humans' superior hunting tactics

By Dan Bloom for MailOnline

Published: 04:13 EST, 1 March 2015 | Updated: 10:31 EST, 1 March 2015

It's thousands of years since mankind won dominance over nature, and we're still pretty proud. [Ridiculous for anyone to assert that mankind has any kind of dominance over nature - ha!  Just in the USA alone we have - oh, the Dust Bowl in the 1930's, the Mississippi River flooding during the 1970's, Hurricane Andrew in the 1990's, Hurricane Katrina, Hurricane Sandy, ongoing desertification of large swatches of the southwest USA that we have no way of combating let alone reversing -- oh the wheels of time just keep on turning...]

 

But a top researcher says we've been giving ourselves too much credit - because we were helped by our oldest friends. [Hell yeah we were.  There is a reason the Great Goddess is so closely associated with canines - duh.] 

 

Humans paired up with dogs as early as 40,000 BC, it is claimed, giving us such an advantage in hunting that it prompted the wipeout of our Neanderthal rivals.  The controversial theory has been put forward in a new book by leading anthropologist Pat Shipman of Pennsylvania State University.

She has challenged the common scientific view that wolves were only domesticated just over 10,000 years ago, after early humans had already asserted a strong foothold in Europe. [Oh please.  Anyone who keeps up with the latest archaeological news knows that humans domesticated canines in several waves over time beginning about 40,000 years ago.  But good for Dr. Shipman for getting good press for the hypothesis to at least start getting the Average Josephine thinking about such a thing.]

 

Instead, she said, humans began taming and breeding wolves - leading to the pets we know today - soon after they arrived on the continent from Africa up to 70,000 years ago.

At the time, our close genetic relatives the Neanderthals were dominant in Europe, fighting for survival as they hunted creatures such as woolly mammoths with primitive tools.

But soon afterwards the rival species died out, leaving a clear path for the homo sapiens that make up today's humans.

Strong rival theories of their demise include that Neanderthals, just like woolly mammoths, were unable to cope with the changing climate of the last ice age or that humans were better hunters. 

 

Dr Shipman, however, told The Observer: 'We formed an alliance with the wolf and that would have been the end for the Neanderthal.  Early wolf-dogs would have tracked and harassed animals like elk and bison and would have hounded them until they tired. Then humans would have killed them with spears or bows and arrows.

 

'This meant the dogs did not need to approach these large cornered animals to finish them off – often the most dangerous part of a hunt – while humans didn’t have to expend energy in tracking and wearing down prey. Dogs would have done that.  Then we shared the meat. It was a win-win situation."

 

Dr Shipman's theory, shared in her book The Invaders: How Humans and Their Dogs Drove Neanderthals to Extinction, was partly inspired by early dog remains.

 

She examined 33,000-year-old fossils of dogs found in Siberia and Belgium, and looked at how the shapes of their jaws and skulls were different from wild wolves.  Although they were far more similar to wolves than the pets of today, there were clear signs of domestication, she said - including shorter snouts, densely-packed teeth and wider jaws.

 

The theory is the latest in a long line about our prehistoric ancestors, many of which contradict each other.  Last year a study at the University of Tübingen in Germany claimed early humans emigrated from Africa far earlier than we first thought - and as many as 130,000 years ago. 

 

Another study at the University of Chicago said wolves began evolving into domestic dogs between 9,000 and 34,000 years ago, while a third study said dogs may not have evolved from wolves as we know them today at all.

Oldest Evidence of Domestication of Dogs is from Europe

More or less simultaneous "domestication" of canines can well have happened in many different part of the world.  However our current canine companions cam to be, I am so happy they did.  I have had the most amazing relationships with my doggies, and I still mourn the passing of each and every one over these forty plus years.  They were the most faithful, unjudgmental and loyal companions, and they loved me no matter what.  Dogs can teach us much about being decent "people."

Dog saves life of owner paralyzed in skiing accident
Posted: Nov 13, 2013 4:13 AM CSTUpdated: Nov 13, 2013 4:19 AM CST

Des Moines, Iowa, man returns, rescues dog who woke him amid house fire
By Michael Walsh / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS  
Wednesday, November 13, 2013, 5:51 PM

Dog saves new owner from house fire
Posted on: 8:44 pm, November 15, 2013, by Joe Borlik,
updated on: 08:45pm, November 15, 2013(Florida dog wakes woman who rescued him from dog shelter less than two weeks earlier)

I saw this at Yahoo news on Friday:

Where did dogs first appear? DNA points to Europe

By MALCOLM RITTER
November 14, 2013 3:00 PM

NEW YORK (AP) — For years, scientists have been dogged by this evolution question: Just where did man's best friend first appear?

  

The earliest known doglike fossils come from Europe. But DNA studies have implicated east Asia and the Middle East. Now a large DNA study is lining up with the fossils, suggesting dogs originated in Europe some 19,000 to 32,000 years ago.

Experts praised the new work but said it won't end the debate.

Scientists generally agree that dogs emerged from wolves to become the first domesticated animal. Their wolf ancestors began to associate with people, maybe drawn by food in garbage dumps and carcasses left by human hunters. In the process they became tamer, and scientists believe people found them useful for things like hunting and guard duty. Over a very long time in this human environment, wolves gradually turned into the first dogs.

The latest attempt to figure out where this happened was published online Thursday by the journal Science.

Researchers gathered DNA from fossils of 18 ancient wolflike and doglike creatures that lived up to 36,000 years ago in Argentina, Belgium, Germany, Russia, Switzerland and the United States. They compared the genetic material to modern samples from 49 wolves from North America, Asia, Europe and the Middle East, 77 dogs of a wide variety of breeds including cocker spaniel, basenji and golden retriever, and four coyotes.

The DNA of modern dogs showed similarities to the genetic material from the ancient European specimens and modern-day European wolves, the researchers reported.

The first dogs evolved by associating with hunter-gatherers rather than farmers, since dogs evidently appeared before agriculture did, they said.

"There are now, based on genetic evidence, three alternative hypotheses for the origin of dogs," said Robert Wayne of the University of California, Los Angeles, a study author.

He said his results suggest a better case for Europe than for east Asia or the Middle East. He also said the kind of wolf that gave rise to dogs is now extinct.

Olaf Thalmann of the University of Turku in Finland, another author, said the work doesn't mean that Europe is the only place where dogs emerged.
"We conclude that Europe played a major role in the domestication process," he said in an email.

The work makes a strong argument for an origin in Europe, although it might not be the only place, said Greger Larson of Durham University in England, who did not participate in the research. "I think it's a real step in the right direction."

Did Dogs Help "Modern" Man Out-Compete "Neanderthal" Man?

Hmmmmm.  I would not argue that having man's best friend as a helper for hauling and hunting was not a benefit to mankind.  I'm just wondering if so-called Neanderthal didn't have dogs too, but we just haven't found the evidence yet.  Maybe we won't, either, because it 's just too old and doesn't exist anymore, or perhaps we don't recognize it for what it is.  And when did it become accepted that mankind has had a relationship with canines for at least 27,000 years?  The last I read, that relationship (canine domestication) was perhaps pushed back to some 17,000 or 18,000 years ago (it was not a straight line, one-time event, but happened in many different places with many different populations), but now we're talking about 10,000 years earlier than even 17,000 BCE (a controversial date to begin with).  When did this happen and why didn't it make the news???

Well, here's the article from theatlantic.com.

Humanity's Best Friend: How Dogs May Have Helped Humans Beat the Neanderthals
By Megan Garber
May 14, 2012

Over 20,000 years ago, humans won the evolutionary battle against Neanderthals. They may have had some assistance in that from their best friends.

One of the most compelling -- and enduring -- mysteries in archaeology concerns the rise of early humans and the decline of Neanderthals. For about 250,000 years, Neanderthals lived and evolved, quite successfully, in the area that is now Europe. Somewhere between 45,000 and 35,000 years ago, early humans came along.

They proliferated in their new environment, their population increasing tenfold in the 10,000 years after they arrived; Neanderthals declined and finally died away.

What happened? What went so wrong for the Neanderthals -- and what went so right for us humans?
The cause, some theories go, may have been environmental, with Neanderthals' decline a byproduct of -- yikes -- climate change. It may have been social as humans developed the ability to cooperate and avail themselves of the evolutionary benefits of social cohesion. It may have been technological, with humans simply developing more advanced tools and hunting weapons that allowed them to snare food while their less-skilled counterparts starved away.

The Cambridge researchers Paul Mellars and Jennifer French have another theory, though. In a paper in the journal Science, they concluded that "numerical supremacy alone may have been a critical factor" in human dominance -- with humans simply crowding out the Neanderthals. Now, with an analysis in American Scientist, the anthropologist Pat Shipman is building on their work. After analyzing the Mellars and French paper and comparing it with the extant literature, Shipman has come to an intriguing conclusion: that humans' comparative evolutionary fitness owes itself to the domestication of dogs.

Yep. Man's best friend, Shipman suggests, might also be humanity's best friend. Dogs might have been the technology that allowed early humans to flourish.

Shipman analyzed the results of excavations of fossilized canid bones -- from Europe, during the time when humans and Neanderthals overlapped. Put together, they furnish some compelling evidence that early humans, first of all, engaged in ritualistic dog worship. Canid skeletons found at a 27,000-year-old site in Předmostí, of the Czech Republic, displayed the poses of early ritual burial. Drill marks in canid teeth found at the same site suggest that early humans used those teeth as jewelry -- and Paleolithic people, Shipman notes, rarely made adornments out of animals they simply used for food. There's also the more outlying fact that, like humans, dogs are rarely depicted in cave art -- a suggestion that cave painters might have regarded dogs not as the game animals they tended to depict, but as fellow-travelers.

Shipman speculates that the affinity between humans and dogs manifested itself mainly in the way that it would go on to do for many more thousands of years: in the hunt. Dogs would help humans to identify their prey; but they would also work, the theory goes, as beasts of burden -- playing the same role for early humans as they played for the Blackfeet and Hidatsa of the American West, who bred large, strong dogs specifically for hauling strapped-on packs. (Paleolithic dogs were big to begin with: They had, their skeletons suggest, a body mass of at least 70 pounds and a shoulder height of at least 2 feet -- which would make them, at minimum, the size of a modern-day German Shepherd.) Since transporting animal carcasses is an energy-intensive task, getting dogs to do that work would mean that humans could concentrate their energy on more productive endeavors: hunting, gathering, reproducing.

The possible result, Shipman argues, was a virtuous circle of cooperation -- one in which humans and their canine friends got stronger, together, over time.

There's another intriguing -- if conjecture-filled -- theory here, too. It could be, Shipman suggests, that dogs represented even more than companionate technologies to Paleolithic man. It could be that their cooperative proximity brought about its own effects on human evolution -- in the same way that the domestication of cattle led to humans developing the ability to digest milk. Shipman points to the "cooperative eye hypothesis," which builds on the observation that, compared to other primates, humans have highly visible sclerae (whites of the eyes). For purposes of lone hunting, sclerae represent a clear disadvantage: not only will your pesky eye-whites tend to stand out against a dark backdrop of a forest or rock, giving away your location, but they also reveal the direction of your gaze. It's hard to be a stealthy hunter when your eyes are constantly taking away your stealth.

Expressive eyes, however, for all their competitive disadvantage, have one big thing going for them: They're great at communicating. With early humans hunting in groups, "cooperative eyes" may have allowed them to "talk" with each other, silently and therefore effectively: windows to the soul that are also evolutionarily advantageous. And that, in turn, might have led to a more ingrained impulse toward cooperation. Human babies, studies have shown, will automatically follow a gaze once a connection is made. Eye contact is second nature to us; but it's a trait that makes us unique among our fellow primates.

Dogs, however, also recognize the power of the gaze. In a study conducted at Central European University, Shipman notes, "dogs performed as well as human infants at following the gaze of a speaker in tests in which the speaker's head is held still." Humans and their best friends share an affinity for eye contact -- and we are fairly unique in that affinity. There's a chance, Shipman says -- though there's much more work to be done before that chance can be converted even into a hypothesis -- that we evolved that affinity together.

"No genetic study has yet confirmed the prevalence or absence of white sclerae in Paleolithic modern humans or in Neanderthals," Shipman notes. "But if the white sclera mutation occurred more often among the former -- perhaps by chance -- this feature could have enhanced human-dog communication and promoted domestication." [Well, until such a study is done canvassing all known prehistoric bones -- if it even can be done given the age of the DNA we're talking about here -- this will forever remain conjecture only.]

Which is another way of saying that, to the extent dogs were an evolutionary technology, they may have been a technology that changed us for the better. The old truism -- we shape our tools, and afterward our tools shape us -- may be as old, and as true, as humanity itself.

Review: Multiple Origins for Domesticated Dogs

From Science Daily

Ancient Domesticated Dog Skull Found in Siberian Cave: 33,000 Years Old

Jan. 23, 2012) — A 33,000-year-old dog skull unearthed in a Siberian mountain cave presents some of the oldest known evidence of dog domestication and, together with an equally ancient find in a cave in Belgium, indicates that modern dogs may be descended from multiple ancestors.

If you think a Chihuahua doesn't have much in common with a Rottweiler, you might be on to something.

An ancient dog skull, preserved in a cave in the Altai Mountains of Siberia for 33,000 years, presents some of the oldest known evidence of dog domestication and, together with equally ancient dog remains from a cave in Belgium, indicates that domestication of dogs may have occurred repeatedly in different geographic locations rather than with a single domestication event.

In other words, man's best friends may have originated from more than one ancient ancestor, contrary to what some DNA evidence previously has indicated.

"Both the Belgian find and the Siberian find are domesticated species based on morphological characteristics," said Greg Hodgins, a researcher at the University of Arizona's Accelerator Mass

Spectrometry Laboratory and co-author of the study that reports the find.

"Essentially, wolves have long thin snouts and their teeth are not crowded, and domestication results in this shortening of the snout and widening of the jaws and crowding of the teeth."

The Altai Mountain skull is extraordinarily well preserved, said Hodgins, enabling scientists to make multiple measurements of the skull, teeth and mandibles that might not be possible on less well-preserved remains. "The argument that it is domesticated is pretty solid," said Hodgins. "What's interesting is that it doesn't appear to be an ancestor of modern dogs."

The UA's Accelerator Mass Spectrometry Laboratory used radiocarbon dating to determine the age of the Siberian skull.

Radioactive carbon, or carbon-14, is one of three carbon isotopes. Along with naturally occurring carbon dioxide, carbon-14 reaches the surface of Earth by atmospheric circulation, where plants absorb it into their tissues through photosynthesis.

Animals and humans take in carbon-14 by ingesting plants or other animals that have eaten plants. "Carbon-14 makes it into all organic molecules," said Hodgins. "It's in all living things."

"We believe that carbon-14 production is essentially constant over time," said Hodgins. "So the amount of carbon-14 present in living organisms in the past was similar to the levels in living organisms today. When an animal or plant dies, the amount of carbon-14 in its remains drops at a predictable rate, called the radioactive half-life. The half-life of radiocarbon is 5,730 years."

"People from all over the world send our laboratory samples of organic material that they have dug out of the ground and we measure how much carbon-14 is left in them. Based on that measurement, and knowing the radiocarbon half-life, we calculate how much time must have passed since the samples had the same amount of carbon-14 as plants and animals living today."

The researchers use a machine called an accelerator mass spectrometer to measure the amount of radioactive carbon remaining in a sample. The machine works in a manner analogous to what happens when a beam of white light passes through a prism: White light separates into the colors of the rainbow.

The accelerator mass spectrometer generates a beam of carbon from the sample and passes it through a powerful magnet, which functions like a prism. "What emerges from it are three beams, one each of the three carbon isotopes," said Hodgins. "The lightest carbon beam, carbon-12, bends the most, and then carbon-13 bends slightly less and carbon-14 bends slightly less than that."

The relative intensities of the three beams represent the sample's carbon mass spectrum. Researchers compare the mass spectrum of an unknown sample to the mass spectra of known-age controls and from this comparison, calculate the sample's radiocarbon age.

At 33,000 years old, the Siberian skull predates a period known as the Last Glacial Maximum, or LGM, which occurred between about 26,000 and 19,000 years ago when the ice sheets of Earth's last ice age reached their greatest extent and severely disrupted the living patterns of humans and animals alive during that time. Neither the Belgian nor the Siberian domesticated lineages appear to have survived the LGM.

However, the two skulls indicate that the domestication of dogs by humans occurred repeatedly throughout early human history at different geographical locations, which could mean that modern dogs have multiple ancestors rather than a single common ancestor.

"In terms of human history, before the last glacial maximum people were living with wolves or canid species in widely separated geographical areas of Euro-Asia, and had been living with them long enough that they were actually changing evolutionarily," said Hodgins. "And then climate change happened, human habitation patterns changed and those relationships with those particular lineages of animals apparently didn't survive."

"The interesting thing is that typically we think of domestication as being cows, sheep and goats, things that produce food through meat or secondary agricultural products such as milk, cheese and wool and things like that," said Hodgins.

"Those are different relationships than humans may have with dogs. The dogs are not necessarily providing products or meat. They are probably providing protection, companionship and perhaps helping on the hunt. And it's really interesting that this appears to have happened first out of all human relationships with animals."

Dogs: From Cave to Kennel

From The Wall Street Journal:

OCTOBER 29, 2011From the Cave to the Kennel

By Ross MacDonald .  He did not include dogs playing chess.

What the evolutionary history of the dog tells us about another animal: ourselves. From a cave in France, a new picture has emerged of canines as our prehistoric soulmates.

Chauvet Cave in southern France houses the oldest representational paintings ever discovered. Created some 32,000 years ago, the 400-plus images of large grazing animals and the predators who hunted them form a multi-chambered Paleolithic bestiary. Many scholars believe that these paintings mark the emergence of a recognizably modern human consciousness. We feel that we know their creators, even though they are from a time and place as alien as another planet.

What most intrigues many people about the cave, however, is not the artwork but a set of markings at once more human and more mysterious: the bare footprints of an 8- to 10-year-old torch-bearing boy left in the mud of a back chamber some 26,000 years ago—and, alongside one of them, the paw print of his traveling companion, variously identified as a wolf or a large dog.

Attributing that paw print to a dog or even to a socialized wolf has been controversial since it was first proposed a decade ago. It would push back by some 12,000 years the oldest dog on record. More than that: Along with a cascade of other new scientific findings, it could totally rewrite the story of man and dog and what they mean to each other.

For decades, the story told by science has been that today's dogs are the offspring of scavenger wolves who wandered into the villages established by early humans at the end of the last ice age, about 15,000 years ago. This view emphasizes simple biological drive—to feed on human garbage, the scavenging wolf had to behave in a docile fashion toward humans. And—being human—we responded in kind, seeking out dogs for their obsequiousness and unconditional devotion.

As the story goes, these tame wolves bred with other tame wolves and became juvenilized. Think of them as wolves-lite, diminished in strength, stamina and brains. They resembled young wolves, with piebald coats, floppy ears and shorter, weaker jaws. Pleading whiners, they drowned their human marks in slavish devotion and unconditional love. Along the way, they lost their ability to kill and consume their prey.

But it was never clear, in this old account, just how we got from the scavenging wolf to the remarkable spectrum of dogs who have existed over time, from fell beasts trained to terrorize and kill people to creatures so timid that they flee their own shadows. The standard explanation was that once the dump-diver became a dog, humans took charge of its evolution through selective breeding, choosing those with desired traits and culling those who came up short.

This account is now falling apart in the face of new genetic analyses and recently discovered fossils. The emerging story sees humans and proto-dogs evolving together: We chose them, to be sure, but they chose us too, and our shared characteristics may well account for our seemingly unshakable mutual intimacy.

Dogs and humans are social beings who depend on cooperation for their survival and have an uncanny ability to understand each other in order to work together. Both wolves and humans brought unique, complementary talents to a relationship that was based not on subservience and intimidation but on mutual respect.

It seems that wolves and humans met on the trail of the large grazing animals that they both hunted, and the most social members of both species gravitated toward each other. Several scholars have even suggested that humans learned to hunt from wolves. At the least, camps with wolf sentinels had a competitive advantage over those without. And people whose socialized wolves would carry packs had an even greater advantage, since they could transport more supplies. Wolves benefited as well by gaining some relief from pup rearing, protection for themselves and their offspring, and a steadier food supply.

The relationship between dogs and humans has been so mutually beneficial and enduring that some scholars have suggested that we—dog and human—influenced each other's evolution.

The Chauvet Cave "dogwolf"—the term I use for a doglike, or highly socialized, wolf who kept company with humans—is controversial, but it cannot easily be dismissed. Over the past three years, it has been grouped convincingly with a number of similar animals that have been identified in Belgium, the Czech Republic, Ukraine and the Altai Mountains in Southern Siberia, dating from 33,000 to 16,000 years ago.

Identification of these early dogs, combined with recent genetic evidence and a growing understanding of animals not as stimulus-response machines but as sentient beings, has broken the consensus model of dog domestication—leaving intact little more than the recognition of the grey wolf, Canis lupus, as progenitor of the dog. Everything else, it seems, is up for grabs.

According to the old view, the dog arose around 15,000 years ago in the Middle East. (Or in China, south of the Yangtze River, an alternate possible origin point added in the last decade in an attempt to reconcile archaeological evidence with emerging DNA evidence.)

The first major challenge to the consensus came in 1997, when an international team of biologists published a paper in the journal Science placing the origin of the dog as early as 135,000 years ago. Their date was based on analysis of mitochondrial DNA, which is passed on to offspring through females and is believed to change little from generation to generation; it allows scientists to calculate the time when populations or species separated genetically. This analysis suggested that wolves could have become dogs wherever in Eurasia they associated closely with early humans, and that even after the split was made, dogs and wolves continued to interbreed.

In short, because of their natural affinities, wherever and whenever wolves and humans met on the trail, some of them began to keep company. Often, when socialized wolves died, there were no others immediately available to replace them. But sometimes several socialized wolves would mate or a socialized female would mate with a "wild" wolf and then have her litter near the human camp. The pups would stay or go, according to their natures. This kind of arrangement could have continued for a considerable period. Any number of them could ultimately have produced dogwolves or dogs. Most of those lines would have vanished over time.

The DNA evidence remained controversial for years, even as most major studies placed the genetic separation of wolf and dog at earlier dates than those favored by archaeologists. Hard proof was slow to appear. The Chauvet Cave paw print once provided the only physical evidence for the existence of dogs before 15,000 years ago—and it was, at best, an indirect piece of support.

Then in 2008, Mietje Germonpré, a paleontologist at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Science and the leader of an international team of scientists, re-examined fossil material excavated from Goyet Cave in Belgium in the late 19th century and announced the identification of a 31,700-year-old dog, a large and powerful animal who ate reindeer, musk oxen and horses. The dogwolf from Goyet Cave was a creature of the Aurignacian culture that had produced the art in Chauvet Cave. [This is the same culture that some archaeologists are now arguing settled along the east coast of the United States some 50,000 years ago.]

Last July, another international team identified the remains of a 33,000-year-old "incipient dog" from the Altai Mountains in southern Siberia. This month, Ms. Germonpré confirmed another find, this one in the Czech Republic, of the remains of a 26,000- to 27,000-year-old dog that had been buried with a bone in its mouth—perhaps to fuel it as it accompanied its human companion to the afterlife.

While the old consensus model held that the first dogs were small, these and other recently identified early dogs are large animals, often with shorter noses and broader faces than today's wolves. These early dogs appear in the camps of hunters of horses, reindeer, mammoths and other big game. From all appearances, they were pack animals, guards, hunters and companions. They are perhaps best viewed as the offspring of highly socialized wolves who had begun breeding in or near human camps.

Our view of domestication as a process has also begun to change, with recent research showing that, in dogs, alterations in only a small number of genes can have large effects in terms of size, shape and behavior. Far from being a product of the process of domestication, the mutations that separated early dogs from wolves may have arisen naturally in one or more small populations; the mutations were then perpetuated by humans through directed breeding. Geneticists have identified, for instance, a mutation in a single gene that appears to be responsible for smallness in dogs, and they have shown that the gene itself probably came from Middle Eastern wolves.

All of this suggests that it was common for highly socialized wolves and people to form alliances. It also leads logically to the conclusion that the first dogs were born on the move with bands of hunter-gatherers—not around semi-permanent pre-agricultural settlements. This may explain why it has proven so difficult to identify a time and place of domestication.

Taken together, these recent discoveries have led some scientists to conclude that the dog became an evolutionary inevitability as soon as humans met wolves. Highly social wolves and highly social humans started walking, playing and hunting together and never stopped. The dog is literally the wolf who stayed, who traded wolf society for human society.

Humans did wield a significant influence over dogs, of course, by using breeding to perpetuate mutations affecting their shape, size and physical abilities. Recent studies suggest that the dog has unique abilities among animals to follow human directions and that its capacity for understanding words can approach that of a two-year-old child. To various degrees, humans appear to have concentrated those and other characteristics and traits through selective breeding.

Since the advent of scientific breeding in the late 18th century, humans have altered the look and temperament of the dog more than they had over thousands of preceding years. A team of gene-sequencers at the Broad Institute of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology estimated that the dog lost 4% of its genetic diversity during its initial separation from the wolf. Much greater losses have occurred as a result of modern breed formation, one result of which is the more than 400 inheritable diseases to which purebreds are uniquely vulnerable.

Recent genetic evidence has confirmed that certain basic types—pariah dogs, sight hounds, mastiffs, spitz-type dogs and small dogs—arose very early in the transformation of wolf to dog. These dogs adapted to their homelands and often had special talents as hunters, guards and eventually herders. These characteristics were often perpetuated over time.

Scientific breeders believed they could improve on nature by consolidating several similar types into one breed or isolating a few prize specimens from a larger population. In both cases, they relied on inbreeding to create and perpetuate the look and talents they wanted. With the advent of kennel clubs in the mid-19th century, the pace of breed creation picked up.

Breeders began to create dogs to fit the needs of the wealthy—from sporting dogs that could point and retrieve fowl, to little puppy-like lap dogs. The dog proved to be a wonderful animal for testing the skill of breeders, since it could be stretched in size from two to 200 pounds.

Purebred dogs were expensive commodities until after World War II, when they became symbols of arrival in the middle class. Increased demand led to increased breeding, often in puppy mills. The resulting dogs had health and behavior problems from bad breeding and the poor care of pregnant females and newborn puppies.

In some cases, the traits that breeders desire are inherited along with unwanted, debilitating conditions—such as when blindness and epilepsy accompany particular coat styles and eye colors. In many regards, the original, naturally occurring breeds were healthier and better at their appointed tasks than their purebred heirs.

But this is just the most recent chapter of a long tale. The tableau in the mud of Chauvet Cave is a stark reminder that dogs and humans have traveled together for tens of thousands of years, from ancient hunting camps to farms, ranches cities and suburbs—from the tropics to the poles. The relationship has endured not because dogs are juvenilized wolves but because they are dogs—our faithful companions.

—Mr. Derr's most recent book is "How the Dog Became the Dog: From Wolves to Our Best Friends."

Someone Buried Their Favorite Doggy With a Bone

I'm all hormonal today, it seems.  This story made me cry.

From MSNBC
Someone gave that prehistoric dog a bone...

Mammoth treat probably put there by human; find shows relationships with canines

By Jennifer Viegas

updated 10/7/2011 2:33:59 PM ET2011-10-07T18:33:59

 

The remains of three Paleolithic dogs, including one with a mammoth bone in its mouth, have been unearthed at Predmosti in the Czech Republic, according to a new Journal of Archaeological Science paper.
The remains indicate what life was like for these prehistoric dogs in this region, and how humans viewed canines. The dogs appear to have often sunk their teeth into meaty mammoth bones. These weren’t just mammoth in terms of size, but came from actual mammoths.

In the case of the dog found with the bone in its mouth, the researchers believe a human inserted it there after death.

"The thickness of the cortical bone shows that it is from a large mammal, like a rhinoceros, steppe bison or mammoth," lead author Mietje Germonpre told Discovery News. "At Predmosti, mammoth is the best represented animal, with remains from more than 1,000 individuals, so it is probable that the bone fragment is from a mammoth."

Germonpre, a paleontologist at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences, and colleagues Martina Laznickova-Galetova and Mikhail Sablin, first studied the remains, focusing on the skulls, to see what animals they represented. In the fossil record, there is sometimes controversy over what is a wolf, dog or other canid.

"These skulls show clear signs of domestication," Germonpre said, explaining they are significantly shorter than those of fossil or modern wolves, have shorter snouts, and noticeably wider braincases and palates than wolves possess.

She described them as large, with an estimated body weight of just over 77 pounds. The shoulder height was at least 24 inches.

"The shape of their skull resembles that of a Siberian husky, but they were larger and heavier than the modern Husky," she said.

The dogs died when they were between 4 and 8 years old, suffering from numerous broken teeth during their lifetimes.

Based on what is known of the human culture at the site, the researchers believe these dogs “were useful as beasts of burden for the hauling of meat, bones and tusks from mammoth kill sites and of firewood, and to help with the transport of equipment, limiting the carrying costs of the Predmosti people.”

Since mammoth meat was likely the food staple, the scientists further believe that the surplus meat “would have been available to feed the dogs.”

The dog skulls show evidence that humans perforated them in order to remove the brain. Given that better meat was available, the researchers think it’s unlikely the brains served as food.

Instead, based on these archaeological finds and the ethnographic record, it’s possible that the body manipulation after death held ritual importance.

"Among many northern indigenous peoples, it was believed that the head contains the spirit or soul," Germonpre explained. “Some of these peoples made a hole in the braincase of the killed animal so that the spirit might be released.”

The mammoth bone in the dog's mouth could signify "that the dog was 'fed' to accompany the soul of the dead person on its journey."

Rob Losey, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Alberta, told Discovery News that the new study is "very convincing," and shows "quite clearly that the dog domestication process was underway thousands of years earlier than previously thought."

He added, "The distinctive treatment given some of the remains also is compelling, and this indicates to me that a special connection had developed between people and some canids quite early on — long prior to any good evidence for dogs being buried."

© 2011 Discovery Channel

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What the article didn't address specifically is how OLD the burials are estimated to be? 

I did a little digging around and found that Predmosti is well known for a long-term established "camp" of mammoth hunters dating from between about 27,000 to 24,300 years ago!  Does that mean that the dog burials are that old too?  That would be incredible.  Modern theory now acknowledges that dogs were domesticated in several different places by several different populations, independently of each other  - there wasn't just one group of dogs from which all current domesticated dogs spring.  As far as I'm aware, the oldest evidence for dog domestication is froma bout 16,000 years ago.

This is an incredible discovery.  If this dating is correct, the domestication of the dogs at Predmosti was already well established about 10,000 years BEFORE the other oldest evidence of domestication we know of currently.  WOW! 

That final touch - putting a bone in a beloved doggy's mouth - that's what got me.  Although it's been seven years since the youngest of my three doggies died, there's not a day goes by that I don't think of them and miss them. 

Evidence of Some of the Earliest Dog Domestication Ever Found

Hmmmm, this seems vaguely familiar, I wonder if I may have reported this from another source some months ago???  From BBC News

August 2011 Last updated at 08:46 ET
Ancient dog skull unearthed in Siberia
By Hamish Pritchard
Science Reporter

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.

The skull, from shortly before the peak of the last ice age, is unlike those of modern dogs or wolves.

The study is published in the open access journal Plos One.

Although the snout is similar in size to early, fully domesticated Greenland dogs from 1,000 years ago, its large teeth resemble those of 31,000 year-old wild European wolves.

This indicates a dog in the very early stages of domestication, says evolutionary biologist Dr Susan Crockford, one of the authors on the study.  "The wolves were not deliberately domesticated, the process of making a wolf into a dog was a natural process," explained Dr Crockford of Pacific Identifications, Canada.

But for this to happen required settled early human populations: "At this time, people were hunting animals in large numbers and leaving large piles of bones behind, and that was attracting the wolves," she said.

The most curious, least fearful wolves tended to have more juvenile characteristics with shorter, wider snouts and smaller, more crowded teeth, features that, over generations, came to define the domesticated dog. {Hmmmm, not sure about this...]

These early dogs would have been useful to people in cleaning up scraps and fending off other predators such as bears, but after the ice age, over the last 10,000 years, they became key members of the team, believes Oxford University archaeologist Professor Thomas Higham, a co-author on the study.

"When you've got hunting dogs, all of a sudden it's a game changer. Hunters with dogs are much better than sole hunters," he told BBC News.

Intriguingly though, this much older early Siberian dog seems to have hit an evolutionary dead end. While people continued to occupy the Altai through the depths of the last ice age, they seem to have done so without their dogs, perhaps as food became more scarce.

"What the ice age did was to cause people to move around more," said Dr Crockford, halting the process of domestication and setting wolves and people back into competition for perhaps 20,000 years.

Fortunately, the closest modern dog, the Siberian Samoyed bred to herd and guard reindeer, seems to have taken up where its ancient predecessor left off.

Woof, Woof! New Evidence of Earliest Domesticated "American" Dog

In case you haven't guessed during the past three plus years I've been blogging, I am a dog lover.  Dogs hold a special place in my heart as great pets, and also as the companion/harbinger of the Goddess.  As my readers also know (from reading this brilliant blog, ahem, if they didn't know it before), in the Middle East in ancient times some gaming pieces were called "dogs" - and I'm not just talking about Hounds and Jackals. 

Now, some games historians might argue that the pieces were called "dogs" because of a hunting connection or even, possibly, a racing connection (you know the drill - "there were three different types of early 'board' games:  hunting games, race games, and games of skill," blah blah blah. Dogs were used in hunting, and dogs were also raced - although I'm not certain they were necessarily raced in ancient times.

But we all know that the real reason the early game pieces were called dogs was because of the canine's close connection to the Goddess and because the games were often used as oracles/fortune telling/divination devices to make inquiries of the Goddess.  In that role, the "dog" pieces took on the role of the Goddess' harbingers. 

Here is the article, it made me sick to my stomach to think my canine friends were eaten like a - a - COW. Oh, ick! And, of course, there are still cultures today that eat dogs. To keep a proper perspective, however, there are cultures who think of anyone who eats beef as a barbarian. So, there you go. Pick your cultural poison and - chomp, chomp... okay, that was in poor taste. But funny, damn!

Researcher finds oldest known domesticated dog in Americas
January 11, 2011 (PhysOrg.com) -- A University of Maine graduate student has discovered evidence of the oldest identifiable domestic dog in the Americas.

Samuel Belknap III, a graduate research assistant working under the direction of Kristin Sobolik in UMaine’s Department of Anthropology and Climate Change Institute, found a 9,400-year-old skull fragment of a domestic dog during analysis of an intact human paleofecal sample.

The fact that the bone was found in human waste provides the earliest proof that humans in the New World used domesticated dogs as food sources.

“This is an important scientific discovery that can tell us not only a lot about the genetic history of dogs but of the interactions between humans and dogs in the past,” said Belknap. “Not only were they most likely companions as they are today, they served as protection, hunting assistants, and also as a food source.”

Belknap’s discovery will first be documented in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology as well as other scientific journals.

At the time Belknap found the bone, he had not set out to discover anything new about ancient animals, but was instead conducting his thesis research on ancient diet and nutrition of humans during the Holocene Era in the Lower Pecos Region of Texas.

“I didn’t start out looking for the oldest dog in the New World,” Belknap said. “I started out trying to understand human diet in southwest Texas. It so happens that this person who lived 9,400 years ago was eating dog. It just goes to show that sometimes, great scientific discoveries come not when we are looking for specific answers but when we are thorough we are in our examination of the evidence and open to what data it provides.”

He discovered the bone, known as BE-20, during the 2009-2010 academic school year while examining a paleofecal sample recovered in the 1970s from Hinds Cave, a major archeological site in southwest Texas near the Mexico border.

Belknap and fellow UMaine graduate student Robert Ingraham first visually identified the bone as a fragment of the right occipital condyle, the place where the skull articulates with the atlas vertebra of the spine. Ingraham also visually identified the bone at Harvard University’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, which indicated that the fragment closely matched that of a short-nosed Indian Dog from New Mexico.

**********************************

Okay, I have an immediate problem with this article. Someone ate a dog. But, someone not only ate a dog, he (or she) ate a piece of bone large enough to be readily identifiable as a part of a dog's skull - in fact as part of a dog's right occipital condyle, the place where the skull articulates with the atlas vertebra of the spine, as well? Now this I find hard to believe. The conclusion that a HUMAN ate a dog is based on the fact that the dog bone fragment was found in some petrified human poop recovered (I hesitate to use the word "excavated" in this particular circumstance) from a Texas cave in the 1970's and laying around all these years. Er, well, okay....

How do they know a HUMAN ate a dog, and that the dog's bone wasn't deposited in some other manner on top of the human poop? Just saying. I know people ate and do continue to eat dogs - but I am not convinced that this particular doggy was eaten and its remains pooped out by a HUMAN. Has a DNA study been conducted to attempt to identify the CONTENTS of the petrified poop?  I mean, if the doggy's bone fragment was preserved, surely DNA of the digested content remains was preserved as well?

If that doggy was eaten by a HUMAN, I sure as hell hope that HUMAN suffered agonies and died an excruciating death as the doggy's bone fragment passed through his (or her) intestines and then through the bowel to be pooped out into that cave.

And that's another thing - why would anyone poop inside a cave in which one lived? I mean, people didn't say, oh excuse me, I have to go poop in the cave now and leave the camp site outside. You don't poop in your living room, and I'm pretty sure humans back then didn't do that either. Hmmmm...

Edited on January 21, 2011 to add the following link - for further information.  To summarize, the piece of dog bone found in the petrified of human poop was, according to this article, stained a color that indicates that it was, indeed, ingested by a human and expelled in the, er, usual way (not via vomiting, in other words). 

Old dog, new tricks: Study IDs 9,400-year-old mutt
By CLARKE CANFIELD, Associated Press Clarke Canfield, Associated Press – Wed Jan 19, 8:58 am ET

World's Oldest Domesticated Dog Remains Debated

World's Oldest Dog Debated
A dog jaw bone fossil found in a Swiss cave may be the oldest evidence of human-canine companionship. .Fri Jul 23, 2010 11:49 AM ET
Content provided by Bruce Bower, Science News

Every dog has its day, but that day took more than 14,000 years to dawn for one canine. A jaw fragment found in a Swiss cave comes from the earliest known dog, according to scientists who analyzed and radiocarbon-dated the fossil. (Image a "yaller dog" - wild dog - from Carolina - this one was bred 'domesticated.'  "Yaller dogs" may have come to the Americas with the first settlers some 16,000 years ago.')

Dog origins remain poorly understood, however, and some researchers say that dog fossils much older than the Swiss find have already been excavated.

An upper-right jaw unearthed in 1873 in Kesslerloch Cave, located near Switzerland's northern border with Germany, shows that domestic dogs lived there between 14,100 and 14,600 years ago, say archaeology graduate student Hannes Napierala and archaeozoologist Hans-Peter Uerpmann, study co-authors at the University of Tübingen in Germany.

"The Kesslerloch find clearly supports the idea that the dog was an established domestic animal at that time in central Europe," Napierala says.

Researchers have also found roughly 14,000-year-old dog fossils among the remains of prehistoric people buried at Germany's Bonn-Oberkassel site.

Older fossil skulls recently identified by other teams as dogs were probably Ice Age wolves, Napierala and Uerpmann argue in a paper published online July 19 in the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology. That includes a 31,700-year-old specimen discovered more than a century ago in Belgium's Goyet Cave and reported in 2009 to be the oldest known dog.

Paleontologist Mietje Germonpré of the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels, who directed the analysis of the Goyet fossil, stands by his conclusions. "The Kesslerloch dog is not the oldest evidence of dog domestication," he says.

Numerous wolf fossils lie near alleged dog remains at Kesslerloch Cave and Goyet Cave, raising doubts about whether either site hosted completely domesticated animals, remarks archaeologist Susan Crockford of the University of Victoria in British Columbia. She regards the Swiss jaw as an "incipient dog" in the early stages of domestication from wolves.

Scientists disagree about how and when dogs originated, other than that wolves provided the wild stock from which dogs were bred. One investigation of genetic diversity in modern dogs and wolves concluded that domestication occurred in southeastern Asia, whereas another placed canine origins in Eastern Europe or the Middle East (SN: 4/10/10, p. 12).

Napierala and Uerpmann suspect that, however the DNA studies pan out, they will show where wolves originated, not dogs. In their view, dogs were domesticated from local wolf populations in various parts of Europe, Asia and perhaps northern Africa sometime before 15,000 years ago.

The Kesslerloch dog jaw and its remaining teeth are considerably smaller than those of wolves recovered from the same site, the scientists say. A space between two of the fossil dog's teeth indicates that domestication must have reached an advanced phase at that time, they argue. During initial stages of domestication, jaws shrink in size faster than teeth, producing dental crowding. Later in the domestication process, teeth get small enough to leave spaces.

Canine fossils from Goyet and several other sites older than Kesslerloch Cave fall within the size ranges of modern and ancient wolves, Napierala adds. Relatively short, robust snouts on the older fossils, initially cited as evidence of domestication, may denote an adaptation of wolves to hunting large Ice Age game, he holds.

Ancient dogs had shorter, broader snouts, wider mouths and wider brain cases than wolves, responds Germonpré. Brain studies indicate that dogs' retinas became reorganized to focus on the central visual field, perhaps to assist in tracking human faces, at the same time that selective breeding produced shorter noses, he says.

Dogs older than the one at Kesslerloch Cave were relatively large, although not as large as wolves, Germonpré argues. Those dogs have been unearthed at sites that have yielded huge numbers of mammoth bones. People living in those areas may have used dogs to haul mammoth meat from kill areas and as sentinels, he proposes.

Napierala and Germonpré agree that a resolution of this debate demands the dogged pursuit of additional canine fossils.

See Did Carolina Dogs Arrive With Ancient Americans?
By Brian Handwerk
for National Geographic News
March 11, 2003

DNA Study of Dogs Points to Domestication in the Middle East

I thought I may have posted the earlier article from September, 2009, about a DNA study indicating that dogs were first domesticated in southern China - to be used as food!  Oh Goddess!  I think I was so appalled by the thought that I didn't post it, because I could not find a link anywhere in this blog to the story.  But here is a sampling of the coverage at the time the story of dog-as-food-in-ancient-China first broke:
Dogs First Tamed in China -- To Be Food?
John Roach for National Geographic News
September 4, 2009

Dogs Domesticated for Meat
Live Science
Submitted by Jeanna Bryner
posted: 08 September 2009 10:44 am ET

In Taming Dogs, Humans May Have Sought a Meal
The New York Times
By NICHOLAS WADE
Published: September 7, 2009

It seems, however, that there may have been an intermediary intermingling of already domesticated dogs that travelled from the Middle East into China with the local wolves, the offspring of which were then re-domesticated by the Chinese - for food!  Oh Goddess.

Well, I know, I know, different cultures and all that.  But - ohmygoddess! 

Here is the story about this new DNA study regarding domestication of the dog:

New Finding Puts Origins of Dogs in Middle East
By NICHOLAS WADE
Published: March 17, 2010

Borrowing methods developed to study the genetics of human disease, researchers have concluded that dogs were probably first domesticated from wolves somewhere in the Middle East, in contrast to an earlier survey suggesting dogs originated in East Asia.

This finding puts the first known domestication — that of dogs — in the same place as the domestication of plants and other animals, and strengthens the link between the first animal to enter human society and the subsequent invention of agriculture about 10,000 years ago.

A Middle Eastern origin for the dog also fits in better with the archaeological evidence, and has enabled geneticists to reconstruct the entire history of the dog, from the first association between wolves and hunter gatherers some 20,000 years ago to the creation by Victorian dog fanciers of many of today’s breeds.

A research team led by Bridgett M. vonHoldt and Robert K. Wayne of the University of California, Los Angeles, has analyzed a large collection of wolf and dog genomes from around the world. Scanning for similar runs of DNA, the researchers found that the Middle East was where wolf and dog genomes were most similar, although there was another area of overlap between East Asian wolves and dogs. Wolves were probably first domesticated in the Middle East, but after dogs had spread to East Asia there was a crossbreeding that injected more wolf genes into the dog genome, the researchers conclude in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature.

The archaeological evidence supports this idea, since some of the earliest dog remains have been found in the Middle East, dating from 12,000 years ago. The only earlier doglike remains occur in Belgium, at a site 31,000 years old, and in western Russia from 15,000 years ago.

Humans lived as roaming hunters and gatherers for most of their existence. Dr. Wayne believes that wolves began following hunter-gatherer bands to feed on the wounded prey, carcasses or other refuse. At some stage a group of wolves, who happened to be smaller and less threatening than most, developed a dependency on human groups, and may in return have provided a warning system.

Several thousand years later, in the first settled communities that began to appear in the Middle East 15,000 years ago, people began intervening in the breeding patterns of their camp followers, turning them into the first proto-dogs. One of the features they selected was small size, continuing the downsizing of the wolf body plan. “I think a long history such as that would explain how a large carnivore, which can eat you, eventually became stably incorporated in human society,” Dr. Wayne said.

The wolf DNA in the study was collected over many years by Dr. Wayne from wolf packs around the world. A colleague, Elaine Ostrander, gathered much of the dog DNA by persuading owners at dog shows to let her take a scraping of cells from inside the cheek. The dog genome has been decoded twice: scientists at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Mass., have sequenced the boxer’s genome, and Craig Venter, a pioneer of DNA sequencing, has decoded his poodle’s genome.

With these two genomes in hand, the Broad Institute designed a dog SNP chip, similar to those used to scan the human for genetic disease. SNPs, or “snips,” are sites of common variation along the DNA. Affymetrix, a SNP chip maker, manufactured the dog SNP chip for Dr. Wayne’s team, letting him have 1,000 chips free, though thereafter they cost $250 apiece. The dog SNP chip brought to light the close relationship between dogs and wolves in the Middle East and also the genetic relationship between various breeds.

Dr. Wayne was surprised to find that all the herding dogs grouped together, as did all the sight hounds and the scent hounds, making a perfect match between dogs’ various functions and the branches on the genetic tree. “I thought there would be many ways to build a herding dog and that they’d come from all over the tree, but there are not,” Dr. Wayne said.

His team has also used the dog SNP chip to scan for genes that show signatures of selection. One such favored dog gene has a human counterpart that has been implicated in Williams syndrome, where it causes exceptional gregariousness. Another two selected genes are involved in memory. Dogs, unlike wolves, are adept at taking cues from human body language, and the two genes could have something to do with this faculty, Dr. Wayne said.

An earlier survey of dog origins, based on a small genetic element known as mitochondrial DNA, concluded that dogs had been domesticated, probably just once, in East Asia. The author of the survey, Peter Savolainen of the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, said he was not convinced by the new report for several reasons, including that it did not sample dogs in East Asia from south of the Yangtze, the region where the diversity of mitochondrial DNA is highest. Also archaeologists in China have been less interested in distinguishing dog and wolf remains, he said.

Two other experts on dog genetics, Carlos Driscoll and Stephen O’Brien, of the National Cancer Institute, said they believed that Dr. Wayne’s team had made a convincing case. “I think they have nailed the locale of dog domestication to the Middle East,” Dr. O’Brien said in an e-mail message from Siberia, where he is attending a tiger management workshop.

Dog domestication and human settlement occurred at the same time, some 15,000 years ago, raising the possibility that dogs may have had a complex impact on the structure of human society. Dogs could have been the sentries that let hunter gatherers settle without fear of surprise attack. They may also have been the first major item of inherited wealth, preceding cattle, and so could have laid the foundations for the gradations of wealth and social hierarchy that differentiated settled groups from the egalitarianism of their hunter-gatherer predecessors. Notions of inheritance and ownership, Dr. Driscoll said, may have been prompted by the first dogs to permeate human society, laying an unexpected track from wolf to wealth.