Publications by authors named "Angela R Perri"

Article Synopsis
  • The grey wolf was the first animal to be domesticated into dogs and lived through the last Ice Age when many other animals went extinct.
  • Scientists studied 72 ancient wolf genomes from different places to understand how wolves were connected and how they evolved over 100,000 years.
  • They found that dogs are more closely related to ancient wolves from eastern Asia, but some dogs in the Near East and Africa share ancestors with different wolves, which means there might have been several ways dogs were domesticated.
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Dogs have been essential to life in the Siberian Arctic for over 9,500 y, and this tight link between people and dogs continues in Siberian communities. Although Arctic Siberian groups such as the Nenets received limited gene flow from neighboring groups, archaeological evidence suggests that metallurgy and new subsistence strategies emerged in Northwest Siberia around 2,000 y ago. It is unclear if the Siberian Arctic dog population was as continuous as the people of the region or if instead admixture occurred, possibly in relation to the influx of material culture from other parts of Eurasia.

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Advances in the isolation and sequencing of ancient DNA have begun to reveal the population histories of both people and dogs. Over the last 10,000 y, the genetic signatures of ancient dog remains have been linked with known human dispersals in regions such as the Arctic and the remote Pacific. It is suspected, however, that this relationship has a much deeper antiquity, and that the tandem movement of people and dogs may have begun soon after the domestication of the dog from a gray wolf ancestor in the late Pleistocene.

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Article Synopsis
  • Dire wolves were common large carnivores in Pleistocene America, but their evolution and extinction are not well understood.
  • Researchers sequenced five genomes from dire wolf sub-fossils dating back 13,000 to over 50,000 years to study their evolutionary history.
  • Findings reveal that dire wolves split from living canids about 5.7 million years ago, evolved in isolation without hybridizing with North American grey wolves or coyotes, and likely originated in the New World, contrasting with the Eurasian ancestry of grey wolves and coyotes.
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Dogs were present in the Americas before the arrival of European colonists, but the origin and fate of these precontact dogs are largely unknown. We sequenced 71 mitochondrial and 7 nuclear genomes from ancient North American and Siberian dogs from time frames spanning ~9000 years. Our analysis indicates that American dogs were not derived from North American wolves.

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Objectives: We measured carbon and nitrogen isotopic ratios in a contemporary population, and tested how the isotopic variability relates to measures of socioeconomic status (e.g., household wealth) and anthropometric measures (e.

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The study of fossil parasites can provide insight into the antiquity of host-parasite relationships and the origins and evolution of these paleoparasites. Here, a coprolite (fossilized feces) from the 1.2-million-yr-old paleontological site of Haro River Quarry in northwestern Pakistan was analyzed for paleoparasites.

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