Just as it is said that cats come from the big cats, such as the lion and the tiger, it is popularly known that the dog comes from the wolves because of their kinship. Is this true or what is the true origin of this species? New research, published in Japan, is getting closer to the answer.
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According to studies published in the Asian environment Japan Times, the legendary Japanese wolf, considered one of the smallest wolves in the world, it would be the closest relative to the ancestors of dogs, more than any other population of gray wolves, who have disappeared with the passage of time.
Yohey Terai is the evolutionary biologist at the Graduate University for Advanced Studies who led the research, and he says the research allows the scientific community to hypothesize that dog lineages diverged from wolves in East Asia.
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His team deduces this after extracting and sequencing the complete genomes of nine Japanese wolves from the 19th to the 20th century and eleven Japanese dogs, including the shiba and the Akita breed dog.
They then compared their sequences to a wide range of canids from around the world, including modern dogs, dingoes, coyotes, and a variety of existing wolves; They built evolutionary trees and found that the Japanese wolf was in fact the closest to dogs among wolves, and that they essentially had a “sibling group relationship” or were the closest relatives to each other, as up to 5.5% of modern canine genomes in eastern Eurasia are derived from the ancestry of the Japanese wolf.
However, Terai cautions that this does not necessarily mean that the dogs were domesticated in East Asia.
“They could have dispersed elsewhere before having a relationship with humans; that is something that we cannot know from the genome data, and something that will require archaeological evidence, “he explains. Thus, they discovered that the Japanese wolf was a unique subspecies of the gray wolf and genetically distinct from modern and ancient gray wolves. (I)
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