Researchers disagree over the whens and wheres of canine domestication

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Scientists investigating the transformation of wolves into dogs are behaving a bit like the animals they study, as disputes roil among those using genetics to understand dog domestication.

In recent months, three international teams have published papers comparing the genomes of dogs and wolves. On some matters such as the types of genetic changes that make the two differ the researchers are more or less in agreement. Yet the teams have all arrived at wildly different conclusions about the timing, location and basis for the reinvention of ferocious wolves as placid pooches. Its a sexy field, says Greger Larson, an archeogeneticist at the University of Durham, UK. He has won a 950,000 (US$1.5-million) grant to study dog domestication starting in October. Youve got a lot of big personalities, a lot of money, and people who want to get their Nature paper first.

In January, Erik Axelsson and Kerstin Lindblad-Toh, geneticists at Uppsala University in Sweden, and their colleagues reported in Nature that genes involved in the breaking down of starch seemed to set domestic dogs apart from wild wolves. In the paper and in media interviews, the researchers argued that dog domestication was catalyzed by the dawn of agriculture around 10,000years ago in the Middle East, as wolves began to loiter around human settlements and rubbish heaps (see Nature http://doi.org/mv4; 2013).

But Larson, who has worked with Lindblad-Toh on other projects, says that their claim is dubious. He notes that bones that look similar to those of domestic dogs predate the Neolithic revolution by at least several thousand years, so domestication must have occurred before then. Why waste space [in a paper] saying something that is patently untrue? he says.

Axelsson concedes that the changes in starch digestion in dogs could have occurred after they were domesticated. But he also counters that the Neolithic era lasted for thousands of years, and that dogs may have been domesticated during the earliest steps towards agrarian life when human hunter-gatherers settled down and began eating more starch-rich wild plants.

A second study, published last month in Nature Communications, argues that dogs were domesticated 32,000years ago when they began scavenging with Palaeolithic humans in southern China. A team led by Ya-ping Zhang at the Kunming Institute of Zoology in China drew that conclusion from studying the whole genomes of several grey wolves, modern European dog breeds and indigenous Chinese dogs.

But Larson says that there is no evidence to suggest that wolves ever lived in southern China, so how do you domesticate a wolf if there arent any? And Jean-Denis Vigne, an archeozoologist at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, agrees, noting that in earlier work, Zhangs team completely ignored what has been published, even in the frame of genetics.

Peter Savolainen, a geneticist at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Solna, Sweden, who co-authored the Nature Communications paper, argues that Chinese scientific literature suggests that wolves did once live south of Chinas Yangtze River, but have since become extinct. But he acknowledges that the date that his team reported like all molecular dating efforts relies on several assumptions, such as the number of genetic mutations that develop in each generation.

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Dog Genetics Spur Scientific Spat