Man's Best Friend, Dogs Were Domesticated Twice, Research Says

A new study has revealed that there was a time when dogs were domesticated by two separate cultures located thousands of miles away from each other.

The Inquisitr has reported that the debate on where dogs originated has been going on for decades. There have been a lot of scientists who can't agree on whether dogs were first domesticated in Europe or Central Asia.

A report from Mental Floss says that some analysis revealed that dogs first appeared in Central Asia, while others are sure that they evolved from wolves in Southeast Asia, or in Europe. However, a new study has surfaced to answer this decade-long debate. It said that man's best friend was domesticated in two sites, separately. The domestication was said to have happened at the same time over 12,000 years ago, and from two different populations of wolves.

Study says we will never know story of dog domestication until we find a Pleistocene wolf. https://t.co/YxklgdzWJu pic.twitter.com/s21Tbb1hFg

— Dognition (@Dognition) March 24, 2016

After the analysis of the mitochondrial DNA of 59 ancient dogs and the complete genome of a Neolithic dog that lived about 4,800 years ago, researchers were able to compare the information with the genetic traits of hundreds of modern breeds. The results revealed a sharp genetic difference among modern Western Eurasian and East Asian dogs.

However, this is where it gets more interesting; their last common ancestors were found to have lived between 14,000 to 6,400 years ago, and there is enough evidence indicating that it originated in Central Asia, but evidence also shows that dogs were already living with Western Europeans at the time, bustle.com reported.

Lead author of the study Laurent Frantz gave the following statement regarding the study's findings. "Reconstructing the past from modern DNA is a bit like looking into the history books: you never know whether crucial parts have been erased. Ancient DNA, on the other hand, is like a time machine, and allows us to observe the past directly."

A researcher from The Atlantic, Greger Larson said that thousands of years ago, during the Paleolithic era, people in Western Europe and Eastern Asia domesticated wolves around the same time, totally independently. However, some Eastern Asian dogs migrated westward with their humans, creating the aforementioned genetic split, and bred with European dogs native to the area. These European dogs were partially replaced by the Eastern Asian newcomers over time and went extinct.

Although the research is only one team's hypothesis, it's well-supported and a detailed one. "[A] full collaboration is going to be essential to untangling this complicated story," population geneticist John Novembre told theTelegraph.