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Genetic Evidence for an East Asian Origin of Domestic Dogs
Peter Savolainen,1*Ya-ping Zhang,2Jing Luo,2Joakim Lundeberg,1Thomas Leitner3
The origin of the domestic dog from wolves has been established,
but the number of founding events, as well as where and whenthese
occurred, is not known. To address these questions, we examinedthe
mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) sequence variation among 654 domesticdogs
representing all major dog populations worldwide. Althoughour data
indicate several maternal origins from wolf, >95% ofall sequences
belonged to three phylogenetic groups universallyrepresented at
similar frequencies, suggesting a common originfrom a single gene pool
for all dog populations. A larger geneticvariation in East Asia than
in other regions and the pattern ofphylogeographic variation suggest
an East Asian origin for thedomestic dog, ~15,000 years ago.
1 Department of Biotechnology, Royal Institute
of Technology (KTH), 10691 Stockholm, Sweden.
2 Yunnan Laboratory of Molecular Biology of Domestic
Animals, and Laboratory of Molecular Evolution and Genome Diversity,
Kunming Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Kunming
650223, China.
3 Department of Virology, Swedish
Institute for Infectious Disease Control, 17182 Solna, Sweden.
*
To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail:
savo{at}biotech.kth.se
Present address: Department of Biology, University of
Konstanz, 78457 Konstanz, Germany.
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