Of village dogs and middle eastern wolves

Hopefully the link will be allowed.
http://retrieverman.wordpress.com/20...tic-diversity/

Thoughts

Haven't read the link - sorry - but there has been a very recent study of MALE dog DNA (as opposed to mitonchondrial, from the female) and they found the highest concentration was in eastern China - NOT the Middle East - and therefore pointed to the Asian Wolf as the likely culprit for first domestication.

Add to that, the 33,000 year carbon dating of a dog bone from Siberia, and you have an interesting new picture.

I posted links to both of these new discoveries on Dogsey, after reading them on archaeological and anthrozoological feeds I am subscribed to.

Bruce Fogle in his recent Daily Mail article referred to both these new findings and may be the first who has put together this new knowledge in the mass media.

It does not surprise me that dogs may have been domesticated for far longer than the cautious estimate of 15,000 years previously quoted by anthrozoologists.

Yep read about those.

Link has several other articles on the subject, scattered about the site.

Heres the source article, looks recent.
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/20...r-ratliff-text

15/20000 years ago is questionable, but then, has it been determined that there was only one, uninterrupted domestication event?

Not sure of their methods, but if they're examining more than just mitochondrial DNA or Y chromosomes alone, it's got to be worth considering surely?

I'd be very surprised if it was just one domestication event, considering the geographical spread and overlap of it between humans and wolves.

At the very least, if it they followed us out of Africa as Middle Eastern wolves that filled a unique niche, there will have been considerable cross breeding between the pariah dogs and local wolves. Unlike most other domestic animals, they've been with us since we were hunter gatherers and it's hard to know which species 'domesticated' which.