Publications by authors named "Varvara V Ivanova"

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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Extant Canis lupus genetic diversity can be grouped into three phylogenetically distinct clades: Eurasian and American wolves and domestic dogs. Genetic studies have suggested these groups trace their origins to a wolf population that expanded during the last glacial maximum (LGM) and replaced local wolf populations. Moreover, ancient genomes from the Yana basin and the Taimyr peninsula provided evidence of at least one extinct wolf lineage that dwelled in Siberia during the Pleistocene.

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Although sled dogs are one of the most specialized groups of dogs, their origin and evolution has received much less attention than many other dog groups. We applied a genomic approach to investigate their spatiotemporal emergence by sequencing the genomes of 10 modern Greenland sled dogs, an ~9500-year-old Siberian dog associated with archaeological evidence for sled technology, and an ~33,000-year-old Siberian wolf. We found noteworthy genetic similarity between the ancient dog and modern sled dogs.

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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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