Grey wolf genomic history reveals a dual ancestry of dogs

Anders Bergström (1) , David W. G. Stanton (2) , Ulrike H. Taron , Laurent Frantz (3) , Mikkel-Holger S. Sinding (4, 5, 6) , Erik Ersmark , Saskia Pfrengle (7) , Molly Cassatt-Johnstone , Ophélie Lebrasseur (8) , Linus Girdland-Flink , Daniel M. Fernandes , Morgane Ollivier (9) , Leo Speidel (1, 10) , Shyam Gopalakrishnan (4) , Michael V. Westbury , Jazmin Ramos-Madrigal (11) , Tatiana R. Feuerborn (7) , Ella Reiter (7) , Joscha Gretzinger (7, 12) , Susanne C. Münzel (7) , Pooja Swali (1) , Nicholas J. Conard (13) , Christian Carøe (14) , James Haile (8) , Anna Linderholm (15, 16) , Semyon Androsov , Ian Barnes (17) , Chris Baumann (7) , Norbert Benecke (18) , Selina Brace (19) , Ruth F. Carden (20) , Dorothée G Drucker , Sergey Fedorov , Mihál Gasparik , Mietje Germonpré (21) , Semyon Grigoriev (22) , Pam Groves , Stefan T. Hertwig , Varvara V. Ivanova , Luc Janssens , Richard P. Jennings (23) , Aleksei K. Kasparov , Irina V. Kirillova , Islam Kurmaniyazov , Yaroslav V. Kuzmin , Pavel A. Kosintsev , Martina Lázničková-Galetová (24) , Charlotte Leduc , Pavel Nikolskiy , Marc Nussbaumer , Ludovic Orlando (25) , Alan Outram , Elena Y. Pavlova , Angela R. Perri , Małgorzat Pilot , Vladimir V. Pitulko , Valerii V. Plotnikov , Albert V. Protopopov , Mikhail Sablin , Andaine Seguin-Orlando (25) , Jan Storå , Christian Verjux , Victor F. Zaibert , Grant Zazula , Philippe Crombé , Anders J. Hansen , Eske Willerslev , Jennifer A. Leonard , Anders Götherström , Ron Pinhasi (26) , Verena J. Schuenemann , Michael Hofreiter , M. Thomas P. Gilbert , Beth Shapiro , Greger Larson , Johannes Krause (27) , Love Dalén , Pontus Skoglund (1)

1 The Francis Crick Institute [London]
2 NRM - Swedish Museum of Natural History
3 LMU - Ludwig Maximilian University [Munich]
4 UCPH - University of Copenhagen = Københavns Universitet
5 Trinity College Dublin
6 University of Greenland
7 University of Tübingen
8 University of Oxford
9 ECOBIO - Ecosystèmes, biodiversité, évolution [Rennes]
10 UCL - University College of London [London]
11 ITU - IT University of Copenhagen
12 MPI-SHH - Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
13 Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen = Eberhard Karls University of Tuebingen
14 Globe Institute
15 Texas A&M University System
16 Stockholm University
17 Natural History Museum [Oslo]
18 DAI - German Archaeological Institute
19 NHM - The Natural History Museum [London]
20 UCD School of Biology and Environmental Science
21 RBINS - Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences
22 North-Eastern Federal University
23 School of Archaeology
24 HNHP - Histoire naturelle de l'Homme préhistorique
25 CAGT - Centre d'anthropologie et de génomique de Toulouse
26 University of Vienna [Vienna]
27 Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology [Leipzig]

Abstract The grey wolf ( Canis lupus ) was the first species to give rise to a domestic population, and they remained widespread throughout the last Ice Age when many other large mammal species went extinct. Little is known, however, about the history and possible extinction of past wolf populations or when and where the wolf progenitors of the present-day dog lineage ( Canis familiaris ) lived 1–8 . Here we analysed 72 ancient wolf genomes spanning the last 100,000 years from Europe, Siberia and North America. We found that wolf populations were highly connected throughout the Late Pleistocene, with levels of differentiation an order of magnitude lower than they are today. This population connectivity allowed us to detect natural selection across the time series, including rapid fixation of mutations in the gene IFT88 40,000–30,000 years ago. We show that dogs are overall more closely related to ancient wolves from eastern Eurasia than to those from western Eurasia, suggesting a domestication process in the east. However, we also found that dogs in the Near East and Africa derive up to half of their ancestry from a distinct population related to modern southwest Eurasian wolves, reflecting either an independent domestication process or admixture from local wolves. None of the analysed ancient wolf genomes is a direct match for either of these dog ancestries, meaning that the exact progenitor populations remain to be located.

Domains: Environmental Sciences; Biodiversity and Ecology

Anders Bergström, David W. G. Stanton, Ulrike H. Taron, Laurent Frantz, Mikkel-Holger S. Sinding, et al.. Grey wolf genomic history reveals a dual ancestry of dogs. Nature, 2022, ⟨10.1038/s41586-022-04824-9⟩. ⟨hal-03717833⟩