The issue of when or where canines were domesticated has geneticists in a tug of war. Image: Les Hirondelles Photography/Flickr/Getty Images

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Scientists investigating the transformation of wolves into dogs are behaving a bit like the animals they study, as disputes roil among those using genetics to understand dog domestication.

In recent months, three international teams have published papers comparing the genomes of dogs and wolves. On some matters such as the types of genetic changes that make the two differ the researchers are more or less in agreement. Yet the teams have all arrived at wildly different conclusions about the timing, location and basis for the reinvention of ferocious wolves as placid pooches. Its a sexy field, says Greger Larson, an archeogeneticist at the University of Durham, UK. He has won a 950,000 (US$1.5-million) grant to study dog domestication starting in October. Youve got a lot of big personalities, a lot of money, and people who want to get their Nature paper first.

In January, Erik Axelsson and Kerstin Lindblad-Toh, geneticists at Uppsala University in Sweden, and their colleagues reported in Nature that genes involved in the breaking down of starch seemed to set domestic dogs apart from wild wolves. In the paper and in media interviews, the researchers argued that dog domestication was catalyzed by the dawn of agriculture around 10,000years ago in the Middle East, as wolves began to loiter around human settlements and rubbish heaps (see Nature http://doi.org/mv4; 2013).

But Larson, who has worked with Lindblad-Toh on other projects, says that their claim is dubious. He notes that bones that look similar to those of domestic dogs predate the Neolithic revolution by at least several thousand years, so domestication must have occurred before then. Why waste space [in a paper] saying something that is patently untrue? he says.

Axelsson concedes that the changes in starch digestion in dogs could have occurred after they were domesticated. But he also counters that the Neolithic era lasted for thousands of years, and that dogs may have been domesticated during the earliest steps towards agrarian life when human hunter-gatherers settled down and began eating more starch-rich wild plants.

A second study, published last month in Nature Communications, argues that dogs were domesticated 32,000years ago when they began scavenging with Palaeolithic humans in southern China. A team led by Ya-ping Zhang at the Kunming Institute of Zoology in China drew that conclusion from studying the whole genomes of several grey wolves, modern European dog breeds and indigenous Chinese dogs.

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Dog Genetics Spur Scientific Spat

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