Tens of thousands of years ago, early humans formed
an unlikely partnership with another animal.
The grey wolf.
Over time, the wolves changed in body and
temperament. Their skulls, teeth and paws shrank.
Their ears flopped. They gained a docile disposition,
becoming both less frightening and less fearful.
They turned into dogs.
Scientists agree that all dogs descend from wild
ancestral wolves, but they disagree as to when, where
and how that happened.
Gregor Larson from the University of Oxford has been
trying to get some firm answers. Already, he and his
team have yielded a surprising discovery. They think
dogs were domesticated not once but twice.
So here's the full story as Larson sees it.
Many thousands of years ago, somewhere in western
Urasia, humans domesticated grey wolves.
And the same thing happened independently
far away in the East.
Around the Bronze Age, some of the ancient eastern
dogs migrated west alongside their human partners.
And along their travels, these migrants encountered the
indigenous, ancient western dogs.
They mated with them, doggy style presumably
and effectively replaced them.
So today's western dogs trace most of their ancestry
to the ancient eastern migrants. Less than 10%
comes from those ancient western dogs, which have
since gone extinct.
Other dog genetics experts think that there are other
possible explanations, but Larson adds that his
gene focused peers are ignoring one crucial line
of evidence - bones.
If dogs originated just once, there should be a neat
gradient of fossils with the oldest ones at the center of
domestication and the youngest ones far away from it.
But that's not what we have.
So we now have a new origin story for dogs.
And this matters because dogs were the first species
that we domesticated.
They came before crops, before livestock.
They heralded a change in our relationship to the
natural world.