What is the origin of the dog? What are its ancestors?

Understanding the origin of the dog is important for science.

Understanding where the dog comes from is important for fundamental research because the history of the dog is closely linked to that of man. Indeed, it is the first animal to have been domesticated. This was done at the end of the Upper Paleolithic, at least 15,000 years ago, while cattle, sheep, goats and pigs were not domesticated until 4,500 years later, at the beginning of the Neolithic.

Archaeological discoveries have uncovered the presence of dog bones in tombs of the Near Eastern Natoufian culture dating back 11,000 years. Scientists believe they can detect a sign of great closeness between man and animal, confirming that it may well be "man's best friend".

Does the origin of the dog have anything to do with wolves?

Yes, this is not a legend! The wolf is indeed the ancestor of the dog. But a study, the results of which were published in June 2016, has clarified this origin.

The dog derives from two wolf domestication:

1. one in Europe, at least 15,000 years ago,
2. the other, in East Asia, at least 12,500 years ago.

It was then between 5000 and 3000 years ago that men migrated from Asia to Europe, taking their domesticated wolves with them. The population of domesticated wolves in Europe would then have become extinct in favor of a new population mixing the populations of Asia and Europe.

Mistakes in education made because of the wolf

Domestication has modified the wolf's behavior, which has gradually adapted. Today, the dog knows how to decode the signals emitted by man. However, it is on the basis of the wolf and the patterns of hierarchy in wild groups that dog training advice has long been issued. Today, however, these are being called into question. It is no longer a question of dominance/subordination.

What prevails today is the balance of interactions. The animal having the memory of interactions, the quality of its relationship with man depends on the sum of these interactions, classified as negative, positive and neutral. If overall the sum is positive, the dog will seek contact with man. This finally seems quite logical and observable on a daily basis.

Dogs show great social intelligence and emotional sensitivity. Research shows that the interpretation of human glances and nods can influence their decisions. Like humans, not all dogs have the same abilities, but the most gifted dogs are able to retain 1,000 different words. And they are not only sensitive to the words themselves but to the way, they are said. However, this sensitivity of dogs towards humans does not lead us to exaggerate their intelligence...

The strength of science

The study, which refuted the idea that the dog had only one origin, Asia, was possible thanks to the analysis of the DNA of archaeological remains, with a great diversity of origins: Europe (France, Switzerland, Germany, Romania...) and Asia (Iran, Turkmenistan, Asian Russia). The complete genome of a 4,800-year-old dog was sequenced.

This study has also shown the immense richness of scientific interdisciplinarity since it combined two ways of analyzing the world, two points of view, that of archaeozoologists and that of paleogeneticists. The former provided the archaeological remains of dogs and the latter extracted and sequenced the DNA from the bones. Computer modeling was also an important part of the work to reconstruct the dog's evolutionary tree.

Unanswered questions remain: why are there differences in size between dogs in Western Europe and those in Eastern Europe, what are the factors behind the evolution of the size, color and shape of dogs.

The contribution of genetics to the understanding of the origins of mankind

Because we know more and more how to make cells and their DNA "speak", which is transmitted from generation to generation and stored for a long time in dead organisms, our knowledge about the evolution and migration of species has evolved a great deal in recent decades, sometimes upsetting what were once thought to be certainties.

Genetics studies the genetic heritage (DNA), but paleogenetics developed in the early 2000s to focus on the study of the genetic heritage of old samples. The progressive improvement of techniques now allows the sequencing of an entire genome, which gives access not only to the history of the maternal lineage, as was the case in the beginnings of this science, but to the entire genetic heritage of individuals, which necessarily enriches the information. Paleogenomics" now refers to that branch of paleogenetics dedicated to the study of complete DNA sequences of ancient samples.

Species are constantly evolving

What science fundamentally tells us is that the world is constantly changing. Life is movement! There would be no more life on Earth if it stopped turning...

Thus, we learn that certain populations of Homo sapiens have had no descendants, that lines of European or Siberian wolves have become extinct. Biodiversity is in constant evolution, because the environment and the climate are also constantly changing, according to factors that we are far from mastering in all their complexity.

The astronomical theory of climate thus develops the idea that long-term variations in the Earth's orbit and rotation generate variations in the amount of sunlight received by the Earth, variations that lead to climate change. The sun, moon and other planets in the solar system disrupt the Earth's motion, but also its orientation. Although long rejected by the scientific community, this theory was finally demonstrated in the 1970s.