Modern dogs come in all shapes and sizes. A new study shows that they began to develop much of that physical diversity thousands of years ago.
Stephanie Keith/Getty Images
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Stephanie Keith/Getty Images
Modern dogs come in all shapes and sizes. A new study shows that they began to develop much of that physical diversity thousands of years ago.
Stephanie Keith/Getty Images
You don’t need to go to a dog park to know that domestic dogs come in all shapes and sizes. From two-pound Chihuahuas to 150-pound Newfoundlands, plump Labradors to slender Vizslas, our canine companions are some of the most physically diverse mammals on the planet.
It is generally believed that this huge range of physical characteristics is a product of the Victorian era, when kennel clubs began selectively breeding dogs to produce certain characteristics about 200 years ago.
A new analysis Hundreds of prehistoric dog skulls spanning the last 50,000 years suggest that it emerged much earlier.
“About 10,000 years ago, half the amount of diversity present in modern dogs was already present in the Neolithic period,” said Carly Amin, a bioarchaeologist at the University of Exeter and one of the lead authors of the new study. “Very early in our relationship with dogs, we not only replaced them with wolves but they also started to mutate among themselves and generate a lot of diversity.”
To determine when those changes occurred, Amin and a team of international researchers created 3D models of 643 skulls of ancient and modern dogs and wolves. The models allowed them to understand subtle changes in the shape of the skull over time.
Results, published in journal Scienceshow that around 11,000 years ago, just after the last Ice Age, the skulls of dogs were already distinct from those of wolves. They were short and wide. But perhaps more surprising, Amin said, is that the dogs’ skulls were already distinct from each other, meaning the transition from wolf to dog must have occurred much earlier.
“The relationship between wolves and dogs may have already been ongoing,” he said. “This is not an instantaneous change – the dog comes into your house from the woods and changes the shape of its skull.”
These types of changes usually accumulate slowly over several generations.
Scientists have long wondered when the domestication of dogs first began. Dogs are believed to be the first domesticated species – before domesticated animals like cows, pigs, sheep or wheat.
The new study doesn’t answer the question, but “it narrows the window,” Amin said, and gives us insight into how humanity’s mutually beneficial relationship with dogs changed them physically over time.
the focus was on that relationship another new studypublished in Science, It used ancient DNA from dogs to find that humans had been traveling with – and even trading – domestic dogs across Eurasia for at least the last 10,000 years.
Minmin Ma, lead author of the study and a researcher at Lanzhou University in China, said it makes sense that prehistoric hunter-gatherers would have brought dogs with them during migration because they could assist with hunting.
But for prehistoric farming and pastoral societies that raised animals like cattle, sheep and horses, “dogs were not particularly essential in that economic sense,” he said. And yet, their study showed that those groups also attempted to bring dogs with them during migration.
“Although dogs have had different roles at different times, they have consistently been close companions to humans,” Ma said. “We should cherish this bond even more.”
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