Is this a dog or a wolf?

Scientists find answer for 18,000-year-old puppy found in Siberian permafrost.

The frozen remains of a puppy (nicknamed “Dogor”) was complete with fur and whiskers. He was found in eastern Siberia in 2018. Early DNA analyses to determine if this was a dog or a wolf were inconclusive, indicating that the pup may have been a common ancestor of both.

In a new study aimed at understanding dog domestication, researchers analyzed the genome of the puppy, along with the genomes of 72 ancient wolves, reported LiveScience . The study was published in Nature and concluded that the puppy was a wolf, not closely related to the earliest dogs.

While is it known that dogs were the earliest animal domesticated by humans, it is not known where this occurred. The analysis of ancient wolf genomes spanned 100,000 years of prehistory in Europe, Siberia and northwestern North America. The genomes revealed that wolves thrived throughout the ice age, with a globally connected population.

Unraveling the domestication process of the dog is far from simple, though. The researchers found that dogs are more closely related to ancient wolves from eastern Eurasia than to those from western Eurasia. This may mean that domestication occurred in the east. But the study also reported that dogs in the Near East and Africa came from a distinct population similar to southwest Eurasian wolves. This could indicate an independent domestication process or genetic mixture from local wolves. None of the analyzed ancient wolf genomes was a direct match for either of these dog ancestries. So, the search for the ancient wolf population that spurred the first domestic dogs continues.