Researchers Disagree Over Dog Domestication.

In recent months, three international teams have published papers comparing the genomes of dogs and wolves. “It’s a sexy field,” says Greger Larson, an archaeogeneticist at the University of Durham, UK. He has won a £950,000 (US$1.5-million) grant to study dog domestication starting in October. “You’ve got a lot of big personalities, a lot of money, and people who want to get their Nature paper first.”

• First study in January, Erik Axelsson and Kerstin Lindblad-Toh, geneticists at Uppsala University in Sweden, and their colleagues reported in Nature1 that genes involved in the breaking down of starch seemed to set domestic dogs apart from wild wolves. In the paper and in media interviews, the researchers argued that dog domestication was catalysed by the dawn of agriculture around 10,000 years ago in the Middle East, as wolves began to loiter around human settlements and rubbish heaps (see Nature http://doi.org/mv4; 2013). But Larson, who has worked with Lindblad-Toh on other projects, says that their claim is dubious. He notes that bones that look similar to those of domestic dogs predate the Neolithic revolution by at least several thousand years, so domestication must have occurred before then.
• A second study, published last month in Nature Communications, argues that dogs were domesticated 32,000 years ago when they began scavenging with Palaeolithic humans in southern China. A team led by Ya-ping Zhang at the Kunming Institute of Zoology in China drew that conclusion from studying the whole genomes of several grey wolves, modern European dog breeds and indigenous Chinese dogs. But Larson says that there is no evidence to suggest that wolves ever lived in southern China, “so how do you domesticate a wolf if there aren’t any?” And Jean-Denis Vigne, an archaeozoologist at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, agrees, noting that in earlier work, Zhang’s team “completely ignored what has been published, even in the frame of genetics”.
• A third paper argues that a more probable date for domestication was 11,000–16,000 years ago. Posted to the arXiv preprint server on 31 May, the study, like Zhang’s, compares the whole genomes of wolves and dogs. But the paper paints an even murkier picture, suggesting that wolves and the ancestors of modern dogs continued to breed together long after domestication, and that the wolf population that gave rise to dogs is extinct. The authors, a team of geneticists co-led by John Novembre at the University of Chicago in Illinois, declined to comment on their work because it has not yet been published in a journal. But Larson and others say that the paper makes a strong point — that studying the genomes of long-dead dogs and wolves is the only way to settle the dispute.

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