Academia, Animals, Society

Study: Dogs Were Domesticated More Than 33,000 Years Ago

220px-Timba+1While it will not sit well with those creationists who reject evolution and believe the Earth is only a few thousand years old, a new study may interest the rest of mankind. The study at the Royal Institute of Technology in Solna, Sweden from that the relationship between man and dog goes back more than 33,000 years ago and appears to have originated in south east Asia. The study shows domestication much earlier than the prior estimate of 10,000 years.

Domesticated dogs migrated from Asia to Europe. Professor Peter Savolainen and colleagues sequenced the genomes of 58 members of the dog family including grey wolves, indigenous dogs from south-east and north-east Asia, village dogs from Nigeria, and a collection of other breeds including the Afghan Hound and Siberian Husky. The greater diversity found in Asia dogs and close overlap with grey wolves confirmed the earlier domestication in Asia. That would put the critical domestication period during the last glacial period, with a peak between 26,500 and 19,000 years ago.

I will now look at my dog Luna with a great deal more respect, though her ancient hunting skills have been reduced to hearing any food hit the kitchen floor.

Here is the study: Cell Research Study

Source: Discovery

28 thoughts on “Study: Dogs Were Domesticated More Than 33,000 Years Ago”

  2. RWL – I do hope after making all this fuss that you have contacted Michael Mann and gotten the details of his study so you could decide for yourself if there was climate change.

  3. It may be “generally accepted” that Homo sapiens originated in Africa, but if you think about it, it doesn’t make much sense. The Chinese are the most evolved and the Africans the least. The Chinese calendar predates that of the Hebrews, at more than 6,000 years old. Africa is still a relatively primitive place. It would thus seem that Africans are still in the relatively early stages of evolution, and that the Chinese have been Homo sapiens and evolving as such for substantially longer than Africans. Why would mankind be descended from a relative late-comer to human evolution, rather than the earliest humans?

  6. I like dogs, horses and cats. I’ve bet a lotta money on the first two @ tracks. Cats would never race each other. They’re socialists.

  7. “I will now look at my dog Luna with a great deal more respect, though her ancient hunting skills have been reduced to hearing any food hit the kitchen floor.”

    If you observer more carefully I am sure you will see that their ancient hunting skills have evolved – not declined.

    Our dogs clearly understand the use of technology such as the refrigerator and their keen eyesight allows them to identify packages of salami from a great distance.

  9. I think the Chinese domesticated the dog in the same way it domesticated chickens and pigs (i.e., dogs mainly used as food source), The group pf dogs hanging around the village waiting to be slaughtered could also provide warning of approaching strangers and predators. I think the understanding is that other peoples to the West developed dogs as hunting aids and herders.

  10. I am a Christian and I do believe God created the heavens and the Earth; AND I love this stuff JT! This interests me. I believe the universe is approximately 14 billion years old. God is good! 🙂

    BTW, Is their anything we should take from the fact southeast Asians eat dog?

  13. TinEar,

    I read the Discovery article. It does not have the actual study on it. It is no different than JT’s article. Both articles or websites do not produce the actual study. Instead, the Discovery article discusses and basically interviews the author(s) about the study? Where is the actual study? You (Discovery and JT’s article) cannot tell me what the findings and/or conclusion are without producing the actual study. This will help me to see how you arrived at your findings, results, and/or conclusion of the study (also the actual study shows what methodology was utilized, historical or current data used, appendices, reference/bibliography page, etc. The actual study will also tell you if this was a scholarly or peer-reviewed-also called a referee-article.).

  14. RWL, you can follow the link provided at the end of the article to Discovery Magazine. It provides additional info on the international study, and cites two authors, Mr. Zhang at a research institute in China, and Mr. Savolainen at a research institute in Sweden. BTW, despite the studies to the contrary, I have always believed that humans originated in China, not Africa. This dog story somewhat supports my theory, and suggests that the dogs followed humans migrating out of Asia and into Europe 33,000 years ago. As an interesting aside, DNA has established that all Finnish males (but not females, for some reason), have an Asian gene, as the Finns migrated from Asia tens of thousands of years ago, which explains why their language is not a European language, unlike their neighbors, the Swedes, Danes and Norweigans, who migrated north from Europe, and are closely related to the Germans.

  15. JT,

    IMHO, You shouldn’t mention what a study says without producing the study so that we can formulate our own opinions, draw conclusions, perform analysis, etc. What are we suppose to do? Take your word for it or go look it up ourselves?

  17. On the 8th Day God Created Dog and Put Dog On Earth To Give Guidance To Humans. This was 7 days after the 1st day. It was more than 33 thousand years ago. God got out of the picture. You humans can pray to God all you want but if you want something you should seek guidance from a dog. God spelled backwards is Dog. Woof.

  20. I think my dogs may be about 33,000 years behind the times with respect to being domesticated.

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