Genomic and archaeological evidence suggest a dual origin of domestic dogs

Laurent A. F. Frantz (1) , Victoria E. Mullin (2) , Maud Pionnier-Capitan (3, 4) , Ophélie Lebrasseur (1) , Morgane Ollivier (3) , Angela Perri (5) , Anna Linderholm (6, 1) , Valeria Mattiangeli (2) , Matthew D. Teasdale (2) , Evangelos A. Dimopoulos (7, 1) , Anne Tresset (4) , Marilyne Duffraisse (3) , Finbar Mccormick (8) , László Bartosiewicz (9) , Erika Gál (10) , Éva A. Nyerges (10) , Mikhail V. Sablin (11) , Stéphanie Bréhard (4) , Marjan Mashkour (4) , Adrian Bălăşescu (12) , Benjamin Gillet (3) , Sandrine Hughes (3) , Olivier Chassaing (3) , Christophe Hitte (13) , Jean-Denis Vigne (4) , Keith Dobney (14) , Catherine Hänni (3) , Daniel G. Bradley (2) , Greger Larson (1)

1 University of Oxford
2 Trinity College Dublin
3 IGFL - Institut de Génomique Fonctionnelle de Lyon
4 AASPE - Archéozoologie, archéobotanique : sociétés, pratiques et environnements
5 Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology [Leipzig]
6 Texas A&M University [College Station]
7 Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
8 QUB - Queen's University [Belfast]
9 Stockholm University
10 MTA - Hungarian Academy of Sciences
11 Zoological Institute of Russian Academy of Sciences
12 National Museum of Romanian History
13 IGDR - Institut de Génétique et Développement de Rennes
14 Department of Archaeology, University of Aberdeen

The geographic and temporal origins of dogs remain controversial. We generated genetic sequences from 59 ancient dogs and a complete (28x) genome of a late Neolithic dog (dated to ~4800 calendar years before the present) from Ireland. Our analyses revealed a deep split separating modern East Asian and Western Eurasian dogs. Surprisingly, the date of this divergence (~14,000 to 6400 years ago) occurs commensurate with, or several millennia after, the first appearance of dogs in Europe and East Asia. Additional analyses of ancient and modern mitochondrial DNA revealed a sharp discontinuity in haplotype frequencies in Europe. Combined, these results suggest that dogs may have been domesticated independently in Eastern and Western Eurasia from distinct wolf populations. East Eurasian dogs were then possibly transported to Europe with people, where they partially replaced European Paleolithic dogs.

Domains: Life Sciences [q-bio]

Laurent A. F. Frantz, Victoria E. Mullin, Maud Pionnier-Capitan, Ophélie Lebrasseur, Morgane Ollivier, et al.. Genomic and archaeological evidence suggest a dual origin of domestic dogs. Science, 2016, 352 (6290), pp.1228--1231. ⟨10.1126/science.aaf3161⟩. ⟨hal-01326370⟩