Anders Bergström, David Stanton, Ulrike Taron, Laurent Frantz, Mikkel-Holger Sinding, Erik Ersmark, Saskia Pfrengle, Molly Cassatt-Johnstone, Ophélie Lebrasseur, Linus Girdland-Flink, Dabiel Fernandes, Morgane Ollivier, Leo Speidel, Shyam Gopalakrishnan, Michael Westbury, Jazmin Ramos-Madrigal, Tatiana Feuerborn, Ella Reiter, Joscha Gretzinger, Susanne Münzel, Pooja Swali, Nicholas Conard, Christian Carøe, James Haile, Anna Linderholm, Semyon Andronov, Ian Barnes, Chris Baumann, Norbert Benecke, Hervé Bocherens, Selina Brace, Ruth Carden, Dorothée Drucker, Sergey Fedorov, Mihály Gasparik, Mietje Germonpré, Semyon Grigoriev, Pam Groves, Stefan Hertwig, Varvara Ivanova, Luc Janssens, Richard Jennings, Aleksei Kasparov, Irina Kirillova, Islam Kurmaniyazov, Yaroslav Kuzmin, Pavel Kosintsev, Martina Lázničková-Galetová, Charlotte Leduc, Pavel Nikolskiy, Marc Nussbaumer, Cóilín O’Drisceoil, Ludovic Orlando, Alan Outram, Elena Pavlova, Angela Perri, Malgorzata Pilot, Vladimir Pitulko, Valerii Plotnikov, Albert Protopopov, André Rehazek, Mikhail Sablin, Andaine Seguin-Orlando, Jan Storå, Christian Verjux, Victor Zaibert, Grant Zazula, Philippe Crombé, Anders Hansen, Eske Willerslev, Jennifer Leonard, Anders Götherström, Ron Pinharsi, Verena Schuenemann, Michael Hofreiter, Thomas Gilbert, Beth Shapiro, Greger Larson, Johannes Krause, Love Dalén, and Pontus Skoglund (2022)

Grey wolf genomic history reveals a dual ancestry of dogs

Nature, 607:pages313–320 (2022).

Abstract

The grey wolf (Canis lupus) was the first species to give rise to a domestic population, and they remained widespread throughout the last Ice Age when many other large mammal species went extinct. Little is known, however, about the history and possible extinction of past wolf populations or when and where the wolf progenitors of the present-day dog lineage (Canis familiaris) lived1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8. Here we analysed 72 ancient wolf genomes spanning the last 100,000 years from Europe, Siberia and North America. We found that wolf populations were highly connected throughout the Late Pleistocene, with levels of differentiation an order of magnitude lower than they are today. This population connectivity allowed us to detect natural selection across the time series, including rapid fixation of mutations in the gene IFT88 40,000–30,000 years ago. We show that dogs are overall more closely related to ancient wolves from eastern Eurasia than to those from western Eurasia, suggesting a domestication process in the east. However, we also found that dogs in the Near East and Africa derive up to half of their ancestry from a distinct population related to modern southwest Eurasian wolves, reflecting either an independent domestication process or admixture from local wolves. None of the analysed ancient wolf genomes is a direct match for either of these dog ancestries, meaning that the exact progenitor populations remain to be located.

Keywords

International Redaction Board, Impact Factor

URL https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04824-9

Related content: Earth and History of Life

Document Actions

Export Bibliography