A village dog in India (credit: flickr user: Jesse Michael Nix)
Sometime before fifteen thousand years ago, humans started domesticating Eurasian gray wolves. Researchers are in agreement that this happened somewhere on the Eurasian continent, but getting any more specific than that has proven difficult. A new paper in PNAS suggests that the region around modern Mongolia or Nepal might be where it all began.
Previous evidence has painted a conflicting picture. The earliest archaeological evidence of dog domestication comes from Europe and Siberia. Meanwhile, genetic evidence from mitochondrial DNA (passed down to individuals by their mothers) and Y chromosomes (which travel down the male line) places the origin of dogs in southern China around 16,000 years ago.
It’s not clear why this conflict exists, but it's a complex story that will likely be difficult to pin down. Migration, interbreeding, and other processes could make the data difficult to interpret, and there could just be enough gaps in our knowledge that we can’t get a good sense of how the overall picture looks.
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