Wolves may have first become Germanic Man's Best Friend in Europe
Scientists have used some new tricks and old dogs to show that thousands of years ago, wolves may have first become man's best friend in Europe.
Researchers extracted DNA from ancient wolf or dog fossils and compared it with DNA from modern dog breeds and wolves. Until recently, labs didn't have the kind of genetic tools they'd need to work with such old dog DNA and do this kind of detailed comparison.
One surprise is that most domestic dogs are more closely related to ancient wolves than modern wolves. "It's these ancient wolf populations, now extinct, probably residing in Europe, that are the direct ancestors of domestic dogs," says Robert Wayne, a biologist at the University of California, Los Angeles.
His team's new analysis, in the journal Science, suggests that European wolves became dogs somewhere around 18,800 to 32,100 years ago, before the start of agriculture.
Wayne says that wolves probably started growing closer and closer to the hunter-gatherers who roamed Europe back then. Perhaps the wolves fed on leftover carcasses, and the hunters found them useful in some way — maybe the wolves were good at finding prey, or could alert hunters to danger.
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