A huge new genetic analysis indicates that man’s best friend descended from Middle Eastern wolves, contradicting previous suggestions that the dog arose in Asia.

In a study published in Nature, UCLA’s Robert Wayne and his colleagues report their study of over 48,000 single nucleotide polymorphisms in dogs (Canis lupus familiaris) and grey wolves (Canis lupus) from across the world and the similarities between these DNA sequences.

“Dogs seem to share more genetic similarity with Middle Eastern gray wolves than with any other wolf population worldwide,” says Wayne. “Genome-wide analysis now directly suggests a Middle East origin for modern dogs.”

Previous work on mitochondrial DNA suggested East Asia was a more likely origin.

“That research made extrapolations about how the domestic dog has evolved from examination of one region in the mitochondrial genome,” says Wayne. “This new Nature paper is a much more comprehensive analysis because we have analyzed 48,000 markers distributed throughout the nuclear genome to try to conclude where the most likely ancestral population is.”

The new paper is also, the authors say, more consistent with archaeological evidence, with the oldest dog remains coming from the Middle East around 12,000 years ago, Belgium 31,000 years ago and western Russia 15,000 years ago. However the new analysis did find that some ancient east Asian dog breeds have similarities with Chinese wolves, suggesting there was some mixing between these animals after domestication, or that these breeds actually derived from Chinese wolves.

Photographs: wikipedia / Graphic: Nature