The happa dog is the ancestor of the pug, Pekingese, and Japanese chin dogs. This dog is a taxidermied specimen at the Rothschild Zoological Museum at Tring, England.
Update: Every word of this post is wrong. The info is no longer up-to-date. Do not quote it as fact.
The origin and actual birthplace for domestic dogs has been found. Apparently, dogs are 16,000 years old and are from an area south of the Yangtze. This evidence comes from a study led by Peter Savolainen.
Now, I once accepted his original study as the final word on dog origins– until I found two studies that seem to contradict his findings. The first of these came from analysis of wolves and dogs from caves in Russia, the Ukraine, and Belgium that claimed that dogs were domesticated during the Aurignacian. My original analysis was entirely within respect to Savolainen’s study.
Savolainen was the first to explore the MtDNA sequences of dogs in different populations throughout the world. He found that Asian dogs were more diverse in their MtDNA sequences, and because species tend to have greater diversity in MtDNA sequences at their point of origin, Savolainen found that dogs originated in East Asia.
Just a few weeks ago, I received word of another study that was based on African dogs. It turns out that Savolainen’s study may have been flawed. It turns out that African dogs are just as genetically diverse as East Asian dogs. Because no C. lupus wolves exist in Africa, we know that dogs can’t be from Africa. However, we would have expected African dogs to be less genetically diverse than East Asian dogs. Apparently, such a finding is not born out by evidence, and thus, we need to be more skeptical about the East Asian origins of domestic dogs.
That means that one should be really skeptical of Savolainen’s studies and the studies that are based upon that original study.
I don’t think we will ever know exactly where dogs were first domesticated. The evidence from different methodologies is too contradictory. When one sees a lot of contradiction from many different methodologies studying the same thing, one needs to be more skeptical. When we have evidence coming from different methodologies that points to the same conclusion, then we can be more sure. We don’t have that with dog domestication.
All we can say is that dogs were domesticated from ancient wolves (of the C. lupus species) back when we were hunter-gatherers. The location was somewhere on the vast landmass of Eurasia.
I know that’s not specific enough for some people, but I think that’s the best we can do right now.
Why does it have to be a definite locale and time. Couldn’t it be said that perhaps there were pockets of evolution that occurred at or round the same time in different areas of the world? And that Hunter gatherers from different land masses were learning the benefits of cooperation with domesticated wolves or canids indigenous to those areas. In the Amazon there are tribes that still keep wild animals captured from kills and raise them as members of the family. Who’s to say that by studying these habits that one can’t conclude that things were perhaps very similar with many tribes from all over the world where nature often put predators contending for the same game in these types of situations. And intelligence through observation would lead a free thinking early human to consider the benefits of adding a fleet of foot four legged hunter into the mix to increase his chances of a successful hunt.
Or maybe back then they had Registries that were closed and thus all those dogs went extinct without a trace???? ;-)
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