{"id":19471,"date":"2015-10-20T08:00:46","date_gmt":"2015-10-20T15:00:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spijue.wpengine.com\/news\/dna-study-says-dogs-first-appeared-in-central-asia\/"},"modified":"2015-10-20T08:00:46","modified_gmt":"2015-10-20T15:00:46","slug":"dna-study-says-dogs-first-appeared-in-central-asia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/news\/dna-study-says-dogs-first-appeared-in-central-asia\/","title":{"rendered":"DNA study says dogs first appeared in Central Asia"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>NEW YORK \u2014<\/strong> Where did dogs first arrive on the scene? Scientists have long debated that question, and now a study of doggie DNA from around the world is pointing to Central Asia.<\/p>\n<p>Man\u2019s best friend may have evolved somewhere near what is now Nepal and Mongolia, researchers say.<\/p>\n<p>Previous studies have suggested southern China, the Middle East, Siberia and Europe as the place where our first domesticated animal arose from wolves at least 15,000 years ago.<\/p>\n<p>For the new work, Adam Boyko of Cornell University and others analyzed DNA from 549 dogs that represented 38 countries in Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, India, the Middle East and islands north and east of Australia. The animals weren\u2019t house pets, but rather \u201cvillage dogs\u201d that wandered freely in the streets or fields.<\/p>\n<p>The researchers examined the DNA for signals of where the dogs had the most ancient roots. That pointed to Central Asia. The analysis did not tackle the contentious question of when dogs appeared.<\/p>\n<p>Results were reported in a paper released Monday by the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.<\/p>\n<p>Even Boyko doesn\u2019t think the work will end the debate among scientists.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI\u2019m not pretending my study alone is enough to rally the community together,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<p>He\u2019s right.  Robert Wayne of the University of California, Los Angeles, who proposed a European origin for dogs in 2013 based on analysis of ancient DNA, said he didn\u2019t buy the conclusion about Central Asia. In an email, he questioned Boyko\u2019s use of modern-day genetic material as a guide to the distant past.<\/p>\n<p>Another expert, Greger Larson of Oxford University, called the paper \u201ca major step forward\u201d but said he also suspected that modern DNA isn\u2019t the way to go.<\/p>\n<p>Now that Central Asia has been added to the mix, \u201cEveryone with a favorite region can point to at least one paper that supports their suspicions,\u201d Larson wrote in an email.<\/p>\n<p>Larson is involved in an international project to tackle the question with ancient DNA and anatomical comparisons.  Boyko said that research will provide an important test of his own work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>NEW YORK \u2014 Where did dogs first arrive on the scene? Scientists have long debated that question, and now a study of doggie DNA from around the world is pointing to Central Asia. Man\u2019s best friend may have evolved somewhere near what is now Nepal and Mongolia, researchers say. Previous studies have suggested southern China, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":19472,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[65],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-19471","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-nation-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19471","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19471"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19471\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19472"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19471"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19471"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19471"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=19471"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}