*But*:
“The widespread distribution of this haplotype from Florida to West Virginia suggests that the hybridization event occurred long ago before the southeastern USA was colonized by coyotes.
However, it could have occurred in the southeastern USA before the main front of coyotes arrived in the area _between male coyotes released for sport_ and _a local domestic dog_.”
There *are* morons intentionally breeding ‘coydogs’ for pets.
The article also says “closely related to” domestic dogs.
That’s a pretty big genetic spread in a very old study.
They’re just now admitting the wolf ancestry, after denying it for decades,
Sequence analysis of 112 southeastern US coyotes revealed 24 unique haplotypes. One haplotype was highly divergent from all other coyote haplotypes with 24-30 bp differences in 394-400 bp, and an average divergence of 8.7%. The sequence did not match any canid sequence in Gen- Bank, and we refer to it as la24. This haplotype is more closely related to haplotypes of grey wolves, differing by 6-11 bp and an average divergence of 2.2%. We compared the divergent sequence found in coyotes to those found in a monophyletic group of dogs, designated clade I (Fig. 1, Vilˆ et al. 1999). This group probably represents the earliest radiation of domestic dog (Vilˆ et al . 1999). The domestic dogs in this clade differ from la24 by 2-5 bp and have an average divergence of 0.8%.