The company of wolves

FOXES can be tamed deliberately, by selective breeding (see article). But this probably recapitulates a process that happened accidentally, many millennia ago, to wolves. The product of that was the animal now known as the dog. But where on Earth this happened is moot. Fossils have been used to make the claim for places as diverse as Russia and the Middle East. Genetic evidence has pointed towards East Asia, with some people believing that New Guinea singing dogs and their Australian offshoots, dingoes (see picture above), are largely unchanged descendants of the first pooches. Olaf Thalmann of the University of Turku, in Finland, Robert Wayne of the University of California, Los Angeles, and their colleagues beg to differ. They think Fido was born in Europe, and that they have the DNA to prove it.

The DNA in question is from mitochondria: cellular power packs that have their own genes. Because each cell has lots of mitochondria, but only one nucleus, there is a better chance of getting mitochondrial genes than nuclear genes from a fossil. And that, as they describe in Science, is what Dr Thalmann, Dr Wayne and the rest of the team did.