Pursuing the Origins of Dog Domestication using Palaeopopulation Genomics

Dogs were unquestionably the first domestic animal and the only animal domesticated within a hunter-gatherer context prior to the advent of agriculture. Understanding the precise temporal and geographic origins of domestic dogs has proven difficult for several reasons including: the widespread distribution of wolves and the lack of an easily interpretable phylogeographic signatures amongst modern dog populations. More recently, studies making use of high-coverage genomes of dogs and wolves have demonstrated that the wolf population from which all dogs descend is likely extinct, exacerbating the difficulty in identifying the wolves which gave rise to dogs. In addition, the history of both domestic plants and animals has incorporate significant degrees of admixture between domestic animals and wild populations that were never involved in the original domestication process. Here I present an empirical demonstration of long-term admixture and patterns of mitochondrial turnover within ancient dog samples. In addition, I will describe a preliminary analysis of a >25x nuclear genome of a Neolithic European dog and discuss how this sample demonstrates the power of ancient genomic data from global samples of ancient dogs and wolves to piece together where, when and how many times dogs were domesticated.