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Dogs originated in the Middle East.
Aug 15
Dogs orientated Middle East.
Scripture reveals in Genesis chapter 8 that the ark of Noah rested on the mountains of Ararat. So it is no surprise that new genetic data indicates that dogs originated in the Middle East, not in Asia or Europe as previously thought.
Robert Wayne, UCLA professor of ecology and senior author of the Nature paper, says "Genome-wide analysis now directly suggests a Middle East origin for modern dogs.
"This is the same area where domestic cats and many of our livestock originated and where agriculture first developed," Wayne noted.
The biologists reports genetic data from more than 900 dogs from 85 breeds (including all the major ones) and more than 200 wild gray wolves worldwide, including populations from North America, Europe, the Middle East and East Asia. They used molecular genetic techniques to analyze more than 48,000 genetic markers. No previous study has ever analyzed anywhere near that many markers.
The biologists have samples from Israel, Saudi Arabia and Iran -- but they have not pinpointed a specific location in the Middle East where dogs originated.
Eighty percent of dog breeds are modern breeds from the last few hundred years. But some dog breeds have histories that go back thousands of years.
"We know that dogs from the Middle East were closely associated with humans because they were found in ancient human burial sites," Wayne said. "In one case, a puppy is curled up in the arms of a buried human."
Framework for dog domestication
The biologists have also found that when one looks at a relationship tree of modern and ancient dog breeds, there is surprising structure to it, and the structure mimics the classifications of dogs by breeders into herding dogs, retrievers, sight hounds, small terriers and others."We found there is a surprising genetic structure that accords with functional classifications -- suggesting that new breeds are developed from crosses within specific breed groups that share particular traits," Wayne said. "If they want a new sight hound, they tend to cross sight hounds with each other, and the same with herding dogs and retrieving dogs. That may not seem so surprising, but we had no reason to think beforehand that these groups would be strongly genealogical.
"There are some notable exceptions, such as 'toy dogs.' In this grouping, there are many different kinds of lineages represented, including traces of herding dogs and retrievers. When it comes to miniaturizing a dog, breeders start with a larger breed and cross that with a miniature dog to make a dwarfed breed on a new genetic background, causing the mixing of various lineages. It's a mix-and-match approach for some of these breed groupings. But in other cases, new breeds have been based on combinations of breeds that have specific traits."
Even though dogs have an almost infinite variety of forms, geneticists have been discovering that much of this diversity has a simple genetic basis. This would confirm Genesis 1:24 that God created variety in animals such as dogs according to their kind.
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