Have dogs always been man's best friend?

Contrary to popular belief, dogs may have always friendly co-existed with humans.

Forty thousand years ago, ancient man and the ancestors of modern, domesticated dogs shared the same space, contrary to what scientists initially believed. Based on earlier studies of the canine genome, today's dogs have evolved from their wilder and hostile ancestors, the wolves, no later than 16,000 years ago.

MUNTINLUPA, PHILIPPINES (Catholic Online) - The recent findings, which have been published in an issue of the journal Current Biology, completely change everything that archeologists have held on to for so many years.

This major and very meaningful breakthrough in history originated when a small fragment of bone was discovered during one of the many expeditions in the Taimyr Peninsula.

At first, they were clueless about which specie this bone came from and it was only after the researchers decided to have the small bone go through some tests and carbon dating, they found that the fragment came from an ancient Taimyr wolf which lived 35,000 to 40,000 years ago.

Swedish Museum of Natural History's Doctor Love Dalen explained that dogs may have been domesticated earlier. There have been speculations as to why these ancient dogs were mingling with humans at an earlier time; one of which was that there were two separate wolf populations in the same peninsula, one was domesticated and the other remained in the wild. While this was a strong theory, it would mean that the wild population would eventually go completely extinct.

The study's first author, Pontus Skoglund from Harvard Medical School, suggested that instead of having two wolf populations occupying the same land area, these untamed wolves may have tracked and followed humans for years - and after some time, developed a way to co-exist.

According to the DNA tests conducted on the fragment, researchers discovered that the ancient Taimyr wolf shares several genes with the modern day Siberian Husky; which means that people have been spending time with the descendants of man's ancient best friends.

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