Dave sent me a link to this study in Heredity that looked a major histocompatibility complex (MHC) variability in domestic dogs.
It found that dogs were so diverse in the MHC in their haplotypes that there had to have been at least 500 wolves in the founding population.
It included 128 Asian dogs in this analysis, and it found that Asian dogs had greater diversity in European dogs, and of course, this leads to people crowing about evidence of an Asian origin for the domestic dog.
Not so fast.
MHC haplotypes have generally been lost as Western dogs have become breeds, and they continue to lose them as popular sire issues stratify the already closed gene pools.
Asian dogs, whether they are construed as breeds or not, have not already undergone this process. Or if they have, they’ve done it for very long.
I am not skeptical of the notion that lots of wolves were used to found the population that became modern domestic dogs.
I am, however, quite skeptical of the hypothesis that dogs originated in East Asia.
It’s much more likely that this was a long process that involved many wolves over a long period of time.
And it happened in many different parts of Eurasia.
Further, it’s also very likely that the dog lineages we have now are but remnants of what once existed. We’ve likely lost y-chromosome and mitochondrial DNA lineages, as well as MHC haplotypes, and because we’re looking at only what exists now, it is actually something a dubious undertaking to try to divine dog origins in this fashion.
We are trying to read backwards through using living dogs, but what we really need are studies of DNA samples from very old specimens– which are not easily procured.
I think the process is likely much more complex than we might like it to be, and it had to have involved the agency of both certain wolves and humans. Without both species exhibit some sort of agency, there would be no domestication of the wolf.
Black-backed jackals have scavenged off of man for a very long time. They have lived in our cities and camps. And they are no black-backed jackals with floppy ears and spots and all the other features we associate with domestication.
For decades, people have looked for simplistic answers to the question about how wolves became dogs.
They’ve not found them.
We’re talking about two species that have pretty complex behavior, and to try to reduce them into a grand theory of domestication is probably not the best way to proceed.
It’s likely far more complex than we can understand at this time (if we can ever understand it at all).
However it occurred, its a wondrous relationship.
Fossil dogs from Europe or even non fossilized skeletons from say, the Middle Ages or Roman times might well answer some of the questions. It’s interesting that the finds at Goyet cave were dismissed because no current dog appears to have the same genes (I believe only MTDNA was recovered). This sounds a lot like the initial assertions regarding Neanderthal interbreeding with H. Sapiens. It doesn’t take much to eliminate MTDNA (one generation of no females will break a female decent line and MTDNA). The assertion that there had to be “only one” was I think, based on the presumption that domesticating wolves was particularly hard. But this has always assumed that the wolves of today are unchanged by human persecution (and therefore present an accurate image of how easy or hard it might be to domesticate a wolf) AND that the wolves that remain today represent the entire wolf genome at the time of domestication. Both of these are pretty major assumptions.
It’s also the case that what is an acceptable level of “domestication” for a hunter /gatherer is the same as it is for most modern dog owners. I doubt that this is the case. If a F1 “domestic” wolf did nothing more than give warning /ward off things like marauding cave bears, helped flush or drive prey into nets by running about and spooking them into the hunters’ traps and didn’t severely bite those that had it, that was probably sufficient. Selection would have done the rest.
Even after many years of persecution, one can still find people-friendly wolves such as Romeo up in Alaska.
I agree the domestication of dogs historically is likely as complicated as human beings.