Dogs originated from Central Asia

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An honorable member of the Coffee Shop Has Just Posted the Following:

It never crossed my mind where did doggies originate from. I believe the domestic dog "evolved" from the wolf but never asked or bothered further than that, but was told that it was the animal that came to man instead of the other way around (the wolves started to hang around outside some cave where we threw scaps of meat out). Some people eat dogs, others keep them as pets. They are employed for work in many areas, are loyal, and make excellent companions. Heard over BBC news earlier this morning that a study points that dogs came from Central Asia, and then came across similar news article here as well. On this subject of origins, I know that the chicken came from Ayam Utan (found in this part of the world), pigs came from wild boar (there must be different species), the domestic cat must've come from some wild feline, cows came from some wild cattle, and humans came from some ape-like creature.

Cheers!


http://www.ibtimes.com/where-do-dogs...l-asia-2147475

Where Do Dogs Come From? New Study Points To Central Asia

By Sarah Berger @sarahberger0408 s.berger@ibtimes.com on October 19 2015 7:02 PM EDT

A genetic study has discovered “man’s best friend” could have originated from Central Asia, instead of Europe, the Near East, Siberia or Southern China, as others have previously suggested, the New York Times reported Monday. After studying a large group of diverse dogs from around the world, scientists traced the origin of dogs to Central Asia, similar to the way genetic studies have located the origin of modern humans in East Africa.
Laura M. Shannon and Adam R. Boyko at Cornell University, along with an international group of scientists, studied purebred dogs along with street or village dogs. They analyzed three types of DNA from 4,500 dogs of 161 breeds and 549 village dogs from 38 countries. The results of the analysis indicated Central Asia, including Mongolia and Nepal, as the place “where all dogs alive today” originated.
Village dogs have a much wider variety of genetic differences than purebred dogs, making them better sources of historical data, according to Shannon, Boyko and their colleagues in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Science/AAAS reported.
“It’s a really comprehensive work including all kinds of markers, and a fairly good geographical coverage,” said Peter Savolainen, an evolutionary geneticist at the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, who has also sampled dogs from around the world to determine their origins, Science/AAAS reported. “So, it gives a good picture of the overall genetic relations among today’s dogs.”
Bokyo did acknowledge there is a possibility some dogs could have been domesticated elsewhere and died out, or canines that had been domesticated somewhere else could have gone to Central Asia and then diversified into all canines alive today. Greger Larson of Oxford University, who is leading a large international effort to analyze ancient DNA from fossilized bones, said he was impressed with the scope of the study, but further testing is needed. Calling the origin of modern dogs, “extremely messy,” he said a combination of studies of modern and ancient DNA is necessary, the New York Times reported.


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