Eine neue Studie hat herausgefunden, dass etwa die Hälfte der bei modernen Hunden beobachteten Variationen bereits in der Steinzeit existierten und stellt damit die gängige Meinung in Frage, dass diese Vielfalt hauptsächlich im viktorianischen Zeitalter entstanden sei.

If you, like me, have a spoiled, lazy dog that enjoys cheese flavoured treats, the fact that your pet’s ancestors were wild predators can seem unfathomable.

But a major new study suggests their physical transformation from wolf to sofa-hogging furball began in the Middle Stone Age, much earlier than we previously thought.

„When you see a Chihuahua – it’s a wolf that’s been living with humans for so long that it’s been modified,“ says Dr Allowen Evin from the University of Montpellier, a lead researcher on this study.

She and her colleagues discovered that the transformation of our pets championed by the Victorians through selective breeding actually started more than 10,000 years ago.

In a paper published in the journal Science, external, this international team of researchers focused their attention on prehistoric canine skulls. Over more than a decade, they collected, examined and scanned bones that spanned a period of 50,000 years of dog evolution.

They created digital 3D models of each of the more than 600 skulls they examined – and compared specific features across ancient and modern dogs – and their wild relatives.

This revealed that, nearly 11,000 years ago, just after the last ice age, dog skulls started to change shape. While there were still slender, wolf-like dogs, there were also many with shorter snouts and wider, stockier heads.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adt0995