Several 10-15,000 year old archaeological finds in Eastern Europe and the Middle East of domestic dog-looking canids indicate that the dog was the first domestic animal. Apart from this, however, archaeological studies have not produced any detailed facts about the origin of the domestic dog. The most basic questions; the number of founding events, and where and when these occurred, have remained unsolved. To address these questions, we examined the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) sequence variation among 654 domestic dogs representing all major dog populations worldwide. We found that although our data indicate several maternal origins from wolf, >95% of all sequences belonged to three phylogenetic groups universally represented at similar frequencies. This suggests a common origin from a single gene pool for all dog populations. A larger genetic variation (as measured by a number of parameters; mean pairwise distance, number of haplotypes and unique haplotypes, genetic distance of unique haplotypes to universal types, proportion of sequences with unique haplotypes) in East Asia than in other regions and the pattern of phylogeographic variation suggest that the domestic dog originated in East Asia. While a precise date for the first origin of the dog cannot be given based on the mtDNA data, a synthesis of the mtDNA data and evidence from the archaeological record suggests that a probable time for the first origin of domestic dogs is ~15,000 years ago.

Key (own) publications

1.	Savolainen P, Zhang Y-P, Luo J, Lundeberg J, Leitner T. Genetic evidence for an East Asian origin of domestic dogs. Science 2002:298, 1610-1613. Abstract and full article