Dr. William Marsh
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
So I think maybe I misspoke, but I was thinking more of the Epigavetians in the Balkan Italy region had these dogs post Ice Age and then spread, rather than being from the Near East.
But in terms of how, where and when dogs themselves became domesticated, we thought when I first had the epiphany that we got a dog here, I really did think we'd be able to answer the question of where were these dogs domesticated?
It hasn't really told us anything like that.
Our whole paper has gone a completely different way compared to what it could have been, which is origins of dog domestication.
And I think the best way to answer this question is just by heavily sampling more canids from a pre-LGM period, which is almost certainly when dogs became domesticated.
to try to pinpoint the link between the grey wolf population, which became domesticated, and the dog population, which we have domesticated.
And there are loads of theories about how this might have occurred.
You've got the LGM, so you've got the ice sheets in northern latitudes.
Very likely human populations did migrate southwards.
Grey wolf populations would have migrated southwards into these refugia.
Grey wolf population in very, very close interaction with the human population
That is probably the process of how dogs came out of wolves with that interaction between initially wild wolves and humans and very, very strong selective pressures, which would have been experienced by this wolf population, which then sort of leaves and become dogs.
Definitely Eurasia, but west, east, don't know.
And you can sort of predict the divergence of a population from genetic data, from modern genetic data, and can very strongly predict it was between 40 and 20,000 years ago, which isn't that precise, to be honest.
Many studies have come out saying, okay, it must have been 100,000 years ago, 80,000 years ago.
But now with the latest data, it's between 40 and 20.