As selected animals of this new breed gave good service as guide dogs for the blind, they were at first regarded as suitable for this work. Due to the increase in the proportion of wolf blood, however the useful ability, inherited from the original ancestor, Gerard, became gradually lost ...
This split most likely happened in East Asia, suggesting this is where the direct wolf ancestor of dogs lived. Terai hopes to extract DNA from ancient wolf bones found in this region to confirm this, but the preservation of DNA in such old bones is likely to be poor, he says....
There is some debate over the evolution of wolves, but it is likely that they evolved from a population of small, early canids during the Pliocene eras from the same line that also preceded the coyote. The wolf and coyote diverged from the same ancestor 1.5 million years ago. Jackals and ...
bringing genetics into line with archeology, and shining a light (yet again) on the Middle East as the locus of dog domestication, or at least of the appearance of small dogs, and, more importantly, by suggesting that the wolf-dog barrier was jumped at about...
No domestic animal has shared more of its evolutionary history in direct contact with humans than the dog (Canis lupus familiaris, also referred to asCanis familiaris), living alongside humans for more than ten thousand years since domestication from its ancestor the gray wolf (Canis lupus). Desp...
Further, very limited knowledge exists on structural variation in the gray wolf, the ancestor of the dog, or other closely related wild canids. Documenting CNVs variation in wild canids is essential to identify ancestral states and variation that may have appeared after domestication. Results In ...
The wolf from which most others arise, the gray wolf is the largest of the canid species. They can be found in a wide variety of habitats throughout most of North America. These animals survived the ice age and are thought to be the ancestor of domestic dog. They may not, however, ...
The domestic dog was once also classified as a subspecies of grey wolf, but recent DNA research shows that dogs and wolves have been evolving separately for more than 30,000 years. The ancestor of both the grey wolf and the dog was a small Eurasian wolf weighing less than 40 pounds, whic...
and thus worshiped the wolf as both a god and an ancestor. According to the Pawnee creation myth, the first creature to experience death. Some tribes believed that the timber wolves, Howling at the moon, were spiritual beings that could speak to the gods and impart magical powers. The Wol...
dogs, fine-tuning the initial social match even more. Why humans can be social with other animals at all may be explained via a common “social toolbox”—a social brain and physiology—shared between humans and other animals because of both a common phylogeny and parallel evolution. Such “...