[HN Gopher] Was This 18,000-Year-Old Siberian Puppy a Dog or a W...
___________________________________________________________________
Was This 18,000-Year-Old Siberian Puppy a Dog or a Wolf? (2019)
Author : nothrowaways
Score : 28 points
Date : 2025-09-27 15:23 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| ccvannorman wrote:
| https://archive.is/YPsAk
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Is this 2019 article news or not? /s
|
| Some discussion at the time:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21660041
| HelloUsername wrote:
| It's posted couple hours before on reddit (https://reddit.com/r
| /interesting/comments/1nrtob9/a_photo_of...). The discovery was
| made in 2018.
|
| Nowadays HN, Reddit, 9gag, it's all crossposts of eachother
| NGRhodes wrote:
| Dogor turned out to be a wolf, not a descendant of the ancient
| wolf line that dogs evolved from -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogor
|
| As a Siberian Husky owner, I find the breed's history
| fascinating. Some of the theories raised in relation to Dogor,
| like dogs deriving from more than one wolf population, are
| actually true for the Siberian Husky through ancient admixture.
| It is one of the few breeds with clear genetic links back to
| Arctic wolf populations, which is why it sits closer to the early
| proto-dog split than nearly all modern breeds.
|
| Dogor is not part of that lineage, but his genome supports the
| idea that domestication was not a single clean event. For
| Huskies, that complexity shows up in their temperament and
| working drive, much closer to their wolf ancestors than most dogs
| today.
| libraryofbabel wrote:
| > It is one of the few breeds with clear genetic links back to
| Arctic wolf populations, which is why it sits closer to the
| early proto-dog split than nearly all modern breeds.
|
| What does this mean? Aren't there just as many generations
| between a Siberian Husky and the wolf-dog split as between a
| pug and the wolf-dog split? Unless you're saying there was
| interbreeding with wolves in the husky's ancestry (but not the
| pug's) after the initial split?
| bitwize wrote:
| That would be interesting, because the modern thinking goes
| that modern wolves are as different from wolves around the
| time of the wolf-dog split as modern dogs are. So if there
| was recent wolf interbreeding in the husky lineage, it's a
| different kind of wolf than what the first dogs were
| descended from. They're all very similar animals, so it may
| only show up on DNA tests, but there may be a sort of genetic
| timestamp showing when the last wolf admixture was that's
| visible on a DNA test.
| cwmoore wrote:
| I have doubts that changes in selection pressure on wolves
| in their natural environment, no matter how many
| generations, is remotely close to domestication and
| selective breeding.
| NGRhodes wrote:
| The thousands of years of selection in the Arctic shaped
| Huskies, not the old wolf/husky interbreeding, which only
| left small but distinct genetic markers. Those came from
| an ancient Arctic wolf that split off around the same
| time as the ancestors of dogs and modern wolves, which is
| why they still show up so clearly today.
| NGRhodes wrote:
| Yes, all breeds are the same distance from the original
| dog/wolf split, but Huskies (northern snow dogs) are
| different because their lineage picked up extra genes from
| ancient Arctic wolves like the 35k-year-old Taimyr wolf. They
| also show direct continuity with ~9000 year old sled dogs
| from Zhokhov Island, while most modern breeds only go back a
| few hundred years. Add in thousands of years of breeding in
| isolation for Arctic work, and the functional traits that
| were developed over that long timespan left Huskies with more
| distinct genes than most other breeds.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-09-27 23:01 UTC)