A recently published article by Chinese scientists revealed that dogs were tamed and domesticated in southern East Asia 33,000 years ago, and 15,000 years later migrated to the rest of the world, the Xinhua News Agency reported.
"Using whole genome sequences from a total of 58 canids (12 gray wolves, 27 primitive dogs from Asia and Africa, and a collection of 19 diverse breeds across the world), we find that dogs from southern East Asia have significantly higher genetic diversity compared to other populations," Wang Guodong, the first author of the research, said.
Wang and the research team from Kunming Institute of Zoology under the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Yunnan Province, in Southwest China, have spent two years collecting and comparing the genome samples, and for the first time, they were able to map how domestic dogs spread across the earth.
"Around 15,000 years ago, a subset of ancestral dogs started migrating to the Middle East, Africa and Europe, arriving in Europe about 10,000 years ago," Wang said. "One of the non-Asian lineages migrated back to the east, creating a series of mixed populations with the endemic Asian lineages in northern China before following humans to the Americas."
According to the Chinese researchers, more than 400 dog breeds may have descended from gray wolves, which are their common ancestors. They, however, cannot say where and how gray wolves became domesticated and the question remains a controversy in the scientific community.
Wang said that a comprehensive investigation by the research team has identified southern Chinese indigenous dogs as the earliest population compared to wolves, from which all other dog populations are derived.
"Considering the extremely close relationship between dogs and humans, the study on dogs can hopefully shed some light upon social activities and migration history of humans," Wang said.
The Chinese researchers' study, "Out of southern East Asia: the natural history of domestic dogs across the world," was published in international life science journal Cell Research.