The earliest known domestication of the canine

The project I chose for my research paper was on the earliest known domestication of dogs and the divergence of their species from the grey wolf, which is believed to have been the first to be domesticated by early humans. In the research they sequenced the genomes of six canid individuals, which included three grey wolves as well as the Australian Dingo, Basenji, and the golden jackal. These three species were used to represent the broad regions of Eurasia which is where the earliest domestication of canines is believed to have occurred. The project used preexisting evidence and research that had revealed dog-like canids had first appeared in the fossil records as early as 33,000 years ago. …show more content…
Once the Last glacial maximum ended and the early Holocene began, wolves once again began to come closer and closer to humans leading to their domestication and the emergence of the domesticated dog. A very strong piece of evidence to support this is the appearance of the amylase locus gene or AMY2B, which helps digest dietary starch and turns it into sugar. This gene has recently been suggested to be a very critical part of the domestication process. It promotes the theory that early canines such as wolves lacked the gene and that they would have had to maintain a carnivorous diet, which makes sense given that fact that early humans were more likely to be hunter gatherers, whereas later on during the domestication process they had adapted the gene because societies had started to become more and more agriculturally dependent. However in certain breeds such as the Alaskan husky the gene has a much lower amount of copies than other breeds due to the fact that they are more commonly associated with the nomadic hunter gatherer tribes of the arctic. Whereas breeds such as the Scottish terrier or the Great Dane are known to have three to four times as many copies of the gene. As for the amount of Amylase genes in wolves it is noticed by the original study that some are more prone to having higher than normal amounts of this gene for their species when compared to domesticated dogs, it is inferred that this is due to crossbreeding between wolves and domesticated