The history of the domestication of dogs, and their thousand-year relationship with us humans, is one of the most fascinating stories of our shared culture, and therefore one of the most studied. A few years ago, for example, we told you how humans and dogs migrated together from the Near East to Europe, a story also confirmed by genetic data.
Today a new study, conducted once again by the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität of Munich and published in Sciencedemonstrates not only that dogs followed humans everywhere during their migrations over the last 10,000 years, but that each population had “its” dogs.
Migrations in company. The study focused on dogs (and their humans) who lived between Siberia, East Asia and the Eurasian steppe, with samples also coming from China for the first time. “Samples” because the team analyzed the genomes of 17 different ancient dog breeds that lived in Eurasia in the last 10,000 years (in addition to those, publicly available, of 57 other ancient breeds and 160 modern breeds).
This was a period of great cultural activity for those regions: the hunter-gatherer populations, but also the first to practice agriculture and pastoralism, began to disperse, migrate and “change homes” – movements which also fueled the first commercial and cultural exchanges between different human populations.
The study. The results of the analysis demonstrate a notable degree of overlap between the genetic changes of human and canine populations: in their migrations, humans always brought their dogs with them. A very evident pattern especially during the Bronze Age in China, about 4,000 years ago: the people who introduced metalworking were people coming from the steppe, who in addition to the new technology also brought their dogs to the Chinese.
Country you’re going, dog you’re taking. A similar situation is found in the movements of the hunter-gatherer populations of Siberia, who migrated accompanied by their dogs, ancestors of modern huskies. In short: during the migrations of the first populations of Eurasia, dogs were always with them – it was inconceivable to arrive in a new place and adopt the local quadrupeds, and already 10,000 years ago there was a strong sense of “ownership” linked to specific breeds.
A discussion which, among domestic animals, applies only to dogs, and which demonstrates once again how much we humans have integrated them into our society – “much more than any other domestic species”, as explained by the first author of the study Laurent Frantz.
