Selective breeding by humans has also morphed the dog’s face, leading to the long-snouted Borzoi, another aerodynamic sight hound built for speed.
Later on, dogs were bred for really specific tasks. Golden Retrievers, Irish Setters, and other “gun dogs,” can be traced back to Victorian England. With developments in firearm technology came these breeds best suited as the huntsman’s retriever, helper, and companion.
Heidi Parker was the co-author of this study. She’s a geneticist and works at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Parker said in a statement, “First, there was selection for a type, like herders or pointers, and then there was admixture to get certain physical traits.” What’s interesting is that breeding dogs for particular traits seemed to have popped up in multiple places at once. For instance, with the advent of agriculture, humans in multiple places in the world employed dogs for herding and guarding livestock.
Turns out, dogs were bred into certain types or “clades.” There are 23 in all. As humans migrated to different places, dogs went with them, even into the Americas across the Bering Strait. Today, all the dogs that we know of in North America originated in Europe. The European breeds superseded the original ones or interbred with them.
There are still a lot of unknowns when it comes to dogs, including how early humans came to domesticate gray wolves, why the first separate breed popped up, what it was, and why dogs continued to evolve into the wide variety we see today. Unraveling how dogs have evolved will help us learn our own history and give us clues into our evolution.
Now, a team of researchers has assembled the most comprehensive genomic map on dogs to date. The results were published in the journal Cell Reports. Researchers gathered blood samples or mouth scrapings from 1,346 dogs, of 161 breeds, over the course of 20 years. The dogs came from Europe, North America, Africa, and Asia.
…and the Basset Hound, a scent hound that relies on endurance and an insanely powerful sense of smell.
All 15 Species of Wild Dog (Wolves, Jackals & Dogs)
Dogs are one of the most diverse species on the planet. Weve bred them small enough to fit in purses and large enough to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with a pony.
But despite all this variety, dogs all belong to the same species — Canis familiaris — and have retained a unifying dog-ness. With a few exceptions all dogs bark, wag their tails, and thrive in the company of people and other dogs.
Canis familiaris was the first life form humans domesticated, even before any plants. And in the roughly 30,000 to 100,000 years since the origin of dogs, weve sculpted a remarkably weird creature. Weve compiled a list of s that show just how crazy dogs have become.