Man's best friend was domesticated twice

摘要

A canine conundrum solved? It looks as if dogs emerged from not one, but two wolf families at opposite ends of Eurasia. Debate has raged for years over whether man's best friend came from Europe or Asia, with genetic studies finding conflicting results. It now appears that both camps may be right. Laurent Frantz at the University of Oxford and his colleagues constructed an evolutionary timeline by comparing the complete genome of a 4800-year-old dog skull from Ireland and mitochondrial DNA samples from 59 ancient dogs that lived up to 14,000 years ago, with genomes of more than 600 modern pooches from across Eurasia.