Photograph by Alida Latham and Danita Delimont
Posted on 01/30/2012 7:20:14 PM PST by SunkenCiv
While a postdoc at Cornell University a few years ago, Adam Boyko became curious about the little-studied village vagrants. Though dogs were first domesticated 20,000 to 15,000 years ago, most breeds go back only a few hundred years. Perhaps village dog DNA might shed light on the long, early history of domestication, when canines were hanging around humans yet not under our domain. But how to get samples?
As it happened, around the same time Boyko's brother Ryan had married, and he and wife Corin were looking for a cheap honeymoon off the beaten track. The three Boykos decided to merge their two quests. Adam -- now at Cornell's College of Veterinary Medicine -- obtained a grant, then enlisted Ryan and Corin to spend their honeymoon traveling around Egypt, Uganda, and Namibia, befriending villagers and local vets. They collected DNA from more than 300 village dogs...
The Boykos continue to expand their sample collection, with another expedition planned for Africa. And they've also begun using the same techniques to solve a related mystery: the strange disappearance of native dogs in South America. We know from the historical record that Native Americans had dogs. But previous population surveys in the Americas turned up only dogs with European heritage. "How do you ship so many dogs across the world that they completely replace the native dogs?" Boyko wonders, suspecting that in fact there may still be village dogs with native DNA in the remotest areas of the continent. So in August the three Boykos packed their bags and headed into the jungles of Peru, searching for the lost American dog.
(Excerpt) Read more at ngm.nationalgeographic.com ...
Photograph by Alida Latham and Danita Delimont
[Photograph by Robert Clark] How to Build a Dog -- Scientists have found the secret recipe behind the spectacular variety of dog shapes and sizes, and it could help unravel the complexity of human genetic disease by Evan Ratliff
People living amidst social destruction probably turned to eating off the dogs first.
Once they bred the corgi they stopped...having reached perfection.
Or, the Jack Russell broke the mold by jumping on it!
Or, the Jack Russell broke the mold by jumping on it!
Fascinating.
Ping
These last few centuries/thousand years, man has produced through artificial selection breeds ranging from the Great Dane to the Chihuahua. The world is approximately 4.6 billion years old.
In other news, Bulldogs rule. Over to you Chet ...
"Dog genes are telling a radically different story from dog bones. An analysis in the June 13 Science concludes that dogs were domesticated much earlier than archaeologists maintain. Instead of a 10,000- to 20,000-year time frame, Robert K. Wayne of the University of California, Los Angeles and his colleagues now have evidence that dogs could have been domesticated 100,000 years ago -- if not earlier."
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| GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother & Ernest_at_the_Beach | |
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Canine trouble you to read this? ;') |
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We have an Australian Cattle dog. I would probably have looked for a Carolina dog had I known about them 12 years ago but our ACD is amazingly smart. One of the foundation breeds is dingo and another one is dalmation. They also have a now extinct scottish herding dog similar to a border collie. He is also part border collie. Once we convinced him that babies grow up to throw frisbies he quit wanting to eat them and became very gentle. He’s not one of those dogs however that I would ever let a baby pull up on. A bit jumpy but if he’s feeling anxious, he either goes into the laundry room or brings a toy to the alpha person in the room.
Village Dogs
Dixie Dingo (Carolina Dog)
One of the cable TV networks did a little story on what would survive something worse than a nuclear holocaust (i.e., an EMP), and they concluded that that sheep dogs would do fine. They would pass along their herding and protection duties to the next generation, and next, and next beyond that...while the rest of the world would collapse around them.
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