Origin of Dogs: Again

In a previous post I mentioned this study which indicates dogs originated in south-eastern Asia some 16,300 years ago. A commenter asked about this study in PNAS. I don’t have access to that paper, but Science Daily summarizes the paper which takes issue with an earlier paper by Savolainen:

Boyko, Bustamante and colleagues used a computer program to track genetic diversity in the samples. They found that the African village dogs are a mosaic of indigenous dogs descended from early migrants to Africa and non-native mixed-breed dogs. Such reputed African breeds as Pharaoh hounds and Rhodesian ridgebacks clustered with non-native dogs, suggesting they originated from outside of Africa.

A previous study of village dog genetics confirmed that domesticated dogs likely originated from Eurasian wolves some 15,000 to 40,000 years ago, and reported that East Asian village dogs had more genetic diversity than any others sampled for the study, suggesting that dogs were first domesticated in East Asia.But the African village dogs analyzed in this study revealed similar genetic diversity, which raises doubt on the claim that dogs were first domesticated in East Asia.

Since I don’t have access to the PNAS I really don’t want to go further than that. I will say, though, that at least in part the paper by Pang et al is a response to the PNAS paper.