{"id":74627,"date":"2012-10-21T22:27:32","date_gmt":"2012-10-22T06:27:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/?p=18860"},"modified":"2012-10-21T22:27:32","modified_gmt":"2012-10-22T06:27:32","slug":"dogs-domesticated-before-agriculture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/2012\/10\/21\/dogs-domesticated-before-agriculture\/","title":{"rendered":"Dogs, domesticated before agriculture"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Origin_of_the_domestic_dog#Archaeology\">domestication of the dog<\/a> is a complex and unresolved topic. <strong>But at this point I am convinced that this is one domestication event which well predates agriculture.<\/strong> To some extent this is common sense. There are tentative archaeological finds of domestic dogs in the New World almost immediately after widespread human habitation of the Western hemisphere, &gt;10,000 years ago. More concretely <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov\/pmc\/articles\/PMC3133791\/\">domestic dog DNA<\/a> has been retrieved from ~9,250 year old coprolites in Texas. The distinctiveness of the New World dogs is well attested genetically. Eskimo dogs for example are nested in a well diverged clade with &#8220;ancient dogs&#8221; (e.g., Basenji), indicating their early separation from the main Eurasian stock. Additionally, from talking to a dog geneticist I am to understand that the Eskimo dogs themselves are likely new arrivals, and superseded older dog lineages in the far north.<\/p>\n<p>These results suggest to me that by the late Pleistocene many of the hunter-gatherer populations of Eurasia existed in a symbiotic relationship with domestic dogs. I suspect that the dog lineages in fact predate the late Pleistocene, and the earliest tendencies toward coexistence with humans may date to before the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Last_Glacial_Maximum\">Last Glacial Maximum<\/a>. And yet an interesting sidelight &#8230;<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~r\/GeneExpressionBlog\/~4\/mBGrkPhoOio\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\"\/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The domestication of the dog is a complex and unresolved topic. But at this point I am convinced that this is one domestication event which well predates agriculture. To some extent this is common sense. There are tentative archaeological finds of dome&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2143,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-74627","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-domestic-dogs","category-ecology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74627","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=74627"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74627\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":74685,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74627\/revisions\/74685"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=74627"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=74627"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=74627"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}