Dr. William Marsh

Yeah.

Genetically, divergence, not much breeding between gray wolf and dog populations.

But perhaps the greatest barrier to gene flow, so this is breeding between the two species, would have been the dog's association with these humans.

Essentially, such a strong barrier that if a dog was to mate with a gray wolf, it's highly likely that that hybrid individual would have, A, been probably too aggressive to be associated with the humans at the time.

but B, also not be accepted within the gray wolf populations, within the gray wolf pack.

So would have almost certainly not have reproduced.

And it's that really strong barrier to genetic drift, which probably what initially caused that divergence between wolves and dogs.

But going back to something which Selena says a little bit more off topic here, there's been so many claims of dogs in the Paleolithic, usually based on morphology.

So I think that one of the earliest claims was 36,000 years ago from a site in Goyer Cave.

So this is a site in Belgium.

And these researchers were completely convinced that this canid was a dog based on morphology, based on its deposition environment.

But our collaborators over at Oxford did the DNA on it.

It turns out it's just an extinct population of gray wolves.

It's very wolfy.

And there are 10 or 12 examples of more recent, so 36, 32, 30,000, 28,000 of these dogs that

which when you do a de-analysis, they just come out with the wolves.

They are essentially wolves.

So actually finding a dog this old has been tried many, many times before, and we were very fortunate to be the first people to actually have cracked it.

But what's interesting here is that the gray wolves would have been hunting the same thing as the humans would have been hunting.

So they would have been tracking the reindeer as they seasonally migrated around.