I found this interview with Peter Savolainen in which he talks about his study of MtDNA from dog populations all over the world.
The findings from that particular study have only now been called into question.
A new study, though, has cast doubt on whether we can definitively say that East Asia is the place where dogs were first domesticated. It turns out that Savolainen may have missed (perhaps through under sampling) the great genetic diversity of street dogs in Africa, which is roughly equivalent to that of Asia. Genetic diversity is a very good indicator of where a particular population got started. Generally, the diversity is greater at the point of origin.
Of course, we know that all dogs are derived from some Eurasian wolf population, and there are no native African wolves, save the Ethiopian wolf, which is not the same species as Canis lupus.
And because the East Asian and African populations are genetically quite diverse we no longer can definitively say that dogs come from East Asia.
To read more about this new study, click here.
