From the NY Times.
Peter Savolainen believes his team has found the origins of the domestic dog in Southern China.
Adam Boyko’s team believes that this conclusion may be premature.
And Stephen O’Brien’s team suggests that there are some holes in the argument that dogs came from East Asia.
And then you have this relatively new study that no one is touching.
And keep in mind that we have actually found the remains of two dogs from the Dnieper Basin that were radio carbon dated to 17,000 years old. I did a post on that finding, but the link to the original abstract has since been taken down. (If someone can find it for me, that would be excellent.)
I think we’re never going to definitively know the origin of the domestic dog. I think that wolf populations have undergone such extreme levels of persecution that whole lines of the species no longer exist. Further, we have had at least one prehistoric subspecies of C. lupus that went extinct after domestic dogs were domesticated. It is very possible that the subspecies from which domestic dogs descend may have also disappeared.
Dogs are derived from Old World wolves somewhere in Eurasia. It happened a very long time ago– before we had large scale agriculture. That’s what we know for sure.
Is that wolf eating a little hairy dog?
It’s in a zoo in Germany. I think it’s either a goat or roe deer.
I just love this vet, dr. Fox. I think he is trully bright.
http://www.twobitdog.com/DrFox/specialreport_Article.aspx?ID=d78aec92-0b02-47f3-9575-cb1778647ad5
Read about “Wags” the captive wolf: http://books.google.com/books?id=_jrDrKS4o-IC&pg=PA45&dq=wags+murie+wolf&client=firefox-a#v=onepage&q=&f=false
She became tamer than most sled dogs.