Dogs were bred to pull our sleds millennia ago

摘要

THE 9500-year-old remains of a dog found on a remote island off Siberia are remarkably similar to living sled dogs in Greenland, genome sequencing has revealed. The discovery shows that people bred dogs for pulling sleds more than 10,000 years ago. "We thought it would be a primitive dog, but it's a long way down the path to domestication," says Mikkel Sinding at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. "That was quite sensational." Excavations of ancient human settlements on Zhokhov Island north of Siberia have revealed the remains of numerous dogs and what look like dog sleds. "It's the first place in history where you have intense dog use," says Sinding. His team sequenced the best-preserved dog found on Zhokhov, along with a 33,000-year-old Siberian wolf and 10 living sled dogs from different places in Greenland, and compared their genomes with each other and with other dog and wolf genomes.