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by Scottie Westfall

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The head of a massive 40,000-year-old wolf discovered in the Yakutian permafrost

June 8, 2019 by SWestfall3

yakutian megafaunal wolf

The Siberian Times reports that the head of a massive wolf was discovered in the permafrost in Yakutia (Sakha Republic of Russia).  The head includes much of the soft tissue, as well as its golden-colored fur. The head is 40 cm (15. 7 inches long), which is pretty large when compared to modern wolf specimens.

Researchers in Russia and Japan will be examining the DNA from the soft tissue to see where it fits in modern wolf and dog phylogeny of which there are still many questions.

This wolf is a good example of what have been termed “megafaunal wolves,” very large gray wolves that lived during the Pleistocene. Robert Wayne of UCLA, a leading canid molecular geneticists, thinks that some form of Pleistocene megafaunal wolf is the progenitor of the domestic dog.  These wolves would have been expert hunters of large bison, reindeer, and horses, and they may have been semi-nomadic, following large herds of ungulates across the steppes and taiga. These semi-nomadic wolves would have been quite easily attached to humans, who were hunting and traveling in much the same way.

Also of note, this wolf has golden colored fur.  In 2015, I postulated a speculative hypothesis that the original Pleistocene wolves were more often golden in color, rather than gray.  When humans started hunting wolves extensively during the Neolithic and into modern times, wolves that were gray were selected for because they could more easily hide from human hunters. Gray color in the dead of winter in many European and Western Asian forests would have been great camouflage against the winter tree trunks and undergrowth of the forest.

Some wolves, especially tundra wolves from northern Russia and Finland, are still often golden in color, as are those in Central Asia.

Golden sable color is quite widespread in domestic dogs, but it is far less common in wolves. So it is quite possible that this coloration is so dominant in domestic dogs because the wolves that gave rise to them were this color.

This massive wolf with golden fur certainly adds some credence to my speculations, but only time will tell what this ancient, massive wolf’s head has in store for us.

But is an amazing find. No doubt about it!

Update: Researchers in Sweden, not Japan or Russia, will be examining its DNA. 

 

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Posted in dog domestication, Uncategorized, wolves | Tagged Megafaunal wolf, Pleistocene wolf, Yakutian wol | 5 Comments

5 Responses

  1. on June 8, 2019 at 8:57 pm Sasha

    I’m not sure that we can trust this to have been the original coloration. The eumelanin in mammalian hair is notoriously less stable post-mortem than pheomelanin.


  2. on June 8, 2019 at 10:30 pm kittenz

    They don’t know yet whether the color in life was gloden, or whether the golden color is an artifact of the soil and water in which it had been frozen for all those millennia. There are a lot of golden-to-reddish wolves among those in northern and central Eurasia, though, so it’s pssible – probable, even – that the golden or reddish color was actually the color of their pelage. Shouldn’t take long to piece that out.

    Have you seen the CT scans? Here’s a link:

    https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/severed-head-giant-40000-year-16479781


  3. on June 10, 2019 at 1:37 pm LurkerReader

    The ancestral Pleistocene wolf from which dogs descend having golden fur would make a lot of sense, especially as one finds that pariah dog breeds and dingos most often have yellow/gold/tan coats.

    i.e. when free-ranging dogs with little to no recent modern wolf ancestry freely interbreed and mix, they often revert to this base coat colour and not the grey/brown/white of modern wolves – like how feral razorback hogs revert to a superficially Eurasian wild boar-like phenotype but not, say, an Indian boar phenotype.

    A similar parallel can be seen with modern horses and the ancient Pleistocene horses of Beringia – these horses had the long, flowing mane so similar to modern domestic horses, not the stiff upright mane of Przewalski’s horses. See link for an example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equus_lambei

    So some features we might think of as artefacts of domestication may not necessarily be so.


    • on June 10, 2019 at 3:59 pm retrieverman

      That’s exactly where I got the idea!


  4. on June 13, 2019 at 6:32 pm tiffany overton

    Makes sense. Look at the red wolf even tho it’s probably a coyote/wolf hybrid or the closely related golden jackal. Hell,the dhole’s got a reddish tint and african dogs ain’t grey. Or,one can look at all the color morphs of the black bear for proof of variation. I think sometimes people consider the timber wolf to be the main examples of wolves,instead of just one subspecies of a varied race in all shapes and sizes.



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