Our dogs’ diversity can be traced back to the Stone Age

If you, like me, have a spoiled, lazy dog ​​who loves cheese-flavored treats, the fact that your pet's ancestors were wild carnivores may seem incomprehensible.

But a major new study suggests that their physical transformation from wolf to sofa-sitting furball began in the Middle Stone Age, much earlier than we previously thought.

“When you see a Chihuahua, it is a wolf that has lived with people for so long that it has been modified,” says Dr. Allouen Evin from the University of Montpellier, lead researcher on the study.

She and her colleagues discovered that the transformation of our pets, encouraged by the Victorians through selective breeding, actually began more than 10,000 years ago.

In the newspaper published in Science magazinethis international team of researchers focused on prehistoric canine turtles. For more than a decade, they collected, examined and scanned bones spanning 50,000 years of dog evolution.

They created digital 3D models of each of the more than 600 skulls they examined and compared the features of ancient and modern dogs, as well as their wild relatives.

This showed that almost 11,000 years ago, just after the last ice age, dog skulls began to change shape. While slender, wolf-like dogs still existed, there were also many dogs with shorter snouts and wider, stockier heads.

Dr Carly Amin from the University of Exeter, another lead researcher on the project, explained to BBC News that almost half of the diversity we see in modern dog breeds today was already present in dog populations by the mid-Stone Age.

“It's really amazing,” she said. “And it begins to challenge ideas about whether the Victorians – and their kennel clubs – were the driving force behind this.”

Dogs were the first animals to be domesticated. There is evidence that humans have lived in close contact with dogs for at least 30,000 years. Where and why this close relationship began remains a mystery.

This research uncovered some of the earliest physical evidence of dogs evolving into the variety of pets, companions, and work animals we know today. And digital scans of the skulls they studied will allow the researchers to answer additional questions about the evolutionary driving forces behind domestication.

Some researchers suggest that humans and wolves met almost by accident when wolves moved to the outskirts of hunter-gatherer communities in search of food.

Wolf tamers received more food, and people gradually came to rely on wolves to clean up the remains of dirty carcasses and raise the alarm if a predator approached.

As for why this ended up changing the dogs' appearance, Dr. Amin said there were likely a number of reasons. She didn't rule out that our ancestors had a preference for square heads and cute snub noses, but explained: “It's likely a combination of interaction with humans, adaptation to different environments, adaptation to different types of food – all of which contributes to the explosion of diversity that we see.”

“It’s hard to figure out which one might be the most important.”

For tens of thousands of years, our human history and the history of our dogs have been intertwined. IN another article in the same issue of Science magazineA research team led by scientists from China studied the ancient DNA of dogs that lived between 9,700 and 870 years ago – in locations across Siberia, the central Eurasian steppe and northwest China.

They concluded that the movements of domestic dogs across the region often coincided with the migrations of human hunter-gatherers, farmers, and herders. Thus, our dogs have traveled with us and been integrated into our society for thousands of years.

I cannot say that my own stubborn, unruly terrier gives me any of the advantages that the first domesticated wolves bestowed upon our ancestors. But I understand why, as studies show, once the dog came for the leftover food, there was no turning back.