Ancient DNA Provides Novel Insights into the Origin of Dogs

Dogs were the first domestic animal and the only one domesticated prior to the advent of settled agriculture. Despite their importance in human history, little is clear about their geographic or temporal origins as multiple issues impair our ability to retrace their history. For example, the wild ancestor of domestic dogs (grey wolf) is widely distributed across New and Old world; thus, multiple populations may have been domesticated in different parts of the world. In addition, over the last millenniums, major human migrations could also have affected dog’s ancestry, erasing ancient signal the genome of modern dogs. Nevertheless, by providing temporal information, ancient DNA can solve these issues (e.g. identify ancestry turnovers). Here we use multiple sources of ancient DNA such as the complete genome (>25x) of a 6,000 years old Neolithic dog from Newgrange (Ireland) as well as mtDNA fragments from over 50 ancient dogs from 10,000 BP to 3,000 BP. We combine this novel data set with modern nuclear and mtDNA genomes as well as SNP data from over 600 dogs. Our analyses illuminate multiple aspects the history of domestic dogs depicting a complex phenomenon with regional ancestry turnovers, and possibly multiple domestication origins.