Dog-Wolf Split | The Scientist Magazine®
Looks like the ancestor of domestic dogs split from a common ancestor before modern wolves developed. I'm not surprised, since several species of wolf, coyotes, and domestic dogs are so closely related that they can still interbreed.
I'm thinking of a scenario like this: a population of wolf ancestors started specializing in scavenging from human garbage. Over time, they were domesticated. Meanwhile, the ancestral species went through a population bottleneck of some kind in which traits of the modern wolf were fixed in that population.
But I'd still like to see the same kind of analysis done on a great many more dog breeds,a s well as mutts from around the world, and more samples from wolves as well, including other gray wolf relatives such as red wolves and coyotes.
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