Posted on 11/21/2002 4:27:05 PM PST by blam
World's dogs are descended from Asian wolves
Scientists have found that almost all dogs share a common gene pool after analysing the DNA of hundreds of dogs from Europe, Asia, Africa and North America.
They have concluded domesticated dogs originated from wolves in East Asia nearly 15,000 years ago.
The animals travelled with humans through Europe and Asia and across the Bering Strait with the first settlers in America.
Swedish and Chinese scientists studied the genes of 654 dogs and found a higher genetic diversity among East Asian dogs suggested that people there were the first to domesticate dogs from wolves.
The scientists said in a study presented in the new issue of the journal Science: "Most earlier guesses have focused on the Middle East as the place of origin for dogs, based on few known facts - a small amount of archaeological evidence from the region, and the fact that several other animals were domesticated there," said lead researcher Peter Savolainen of Sweden's Royal Institute of Technology.
A separate study by researchers in the US, Latin America and Sweden said dogs with DNA linked to Eurasian wolves were present in the Americas before the arrival of European explorers in the 15th century.
That suggests the first settlers in America, believed to have crossed the Bering Strait from Asia 12,000-14,000 years ago, brought domesticated dogs with them, the study said.
Uppsala University researcher Carles Vila said the presence of dogs could explain why the settlers spread through the Americas relatively quickly.
The two studies disagreed on when people first started domesticating dogs from wolves.
The earliest finding of dog remains a jawbone from Germany which is 14,000 years old. The Swedish-Chinese research team said DNA analyses, coupled with archaeological finds, pointed to a point of origin about 15,000 years ago.
Story filed: 19:02 Thursday 21st November 2002
So, hillary's not decended from monkeys afterall.
Hmmmmm. . . When NOW spokeswomyn make noise, all I hear is "blah blah blah blah blah white males blah blah blah blah blah rape blah blah blah blah patriarchy blah blah blah blah blah reproductive choice."
And when democrats speak it goes something like this "blah blah blah blah blah white males blah blah blah blah blah big corporations blah blah blah blah take away social security."
And when Sierra Club representatives speak . . . well, you get the picture.
Maybe we are onto big here. Maybe they are just barking and that's why their utterances seem to have no meaning! Has anyone ever run a DNA test on these folks to see if they are really human? Does X-Files know about this?
What human breeders manipulated was neotony. That is, they extended picked wolves who had an extended puppyhood. Generations of that resulted in most dogs acting like wolf puppies (not particularly agressive). Nhey never turn into adult wolves behaviorally. Then there was Cujo . . .
They might be loyal to you. But my wife sure would not trust those wolves around our toddlers, and I doubt a cave-man-made fenced pen would be strong enough to reassure her. Additionally, and please don't take this the wrong way, I think the village chieftain would side with us against you regarding the safety of raising wild animals. This is part of the line of thinking leading to the idea that early man could not really domesticate animals, so the animals had to come to man pre-domesticated. However, since neither of us was there, we certainly can't know for sure.
Our border collie mix does not really behave like a puppy. What she does is undertake, with considerable bravado, the early part of the hunt, in which the prey, whether toddlers or gerbils, is rounded up. However, once the roundup is complete, she is blessedly innocent as to what is supposed to come next.
As to what human breeders did, is such existed there is absolutely no way to know for sure, although I have given my surmise.
What makes a dog a dog is behavior, not appearance. A dog-looking wolf or jackal is a wolf or jackal, and visa versa. You can't tell from a fossile if a creature attacked small children or befriended them. This is the type of going far beyond all evidence that should mark the so-called scientist who comes up with this stuff as a crank.
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