Deciphering dog domestication through a combined ancient DNA and geometric morphometric approach

从狩猎和采集到农业生活方式的转变是我们物种历史上最深刻的事件之一，并继续影响我们今天的生存。理解这一过程是理解人类文明起源和兴起的关键。然而，尽管经过了数十年的研究，关于它为何、在何处以及如何发生的根本问题在很大程度上仍然没有答案。如果没有对选定的动物和植物的驯化，人类生存的这种根本性变化是不可能实现的。狗在这个故事中至关重要，因为它不仅是有史以来第一种家养动物，也是唯一一种在农民出现之前几千年被狩猎采集者驯化的动物。早期家养狗及其野生狼祖先的骨头和牙齿为我们了解人类和野生动物如何、何时何地开始我们今天仍然依赖的关系提供了重要线索。这些遗骸早在15,000年前就在欧亚大陆的许多考古遗址中被发现，这表明狗要么在旧世界被独立驯化过几次，要么只被驯化过一次，随后随着石器时代晚期的狩猎采集者在欧亚大陆传播到北美。也有人认为狼参与了大约32,000年前冰河时代旧石器时代猎人的早期失败的驯化实验。尽管我们通常知道所有其他农家动物驯化的时间和地点，但我们对最具代表性的家畜的起源仍然知之甚少。新的科学技术，包括遗传学和对古代骨骼和牙齿形状的统计分析相结合，开始为驯化过程本身的生物学提供独特的见解，以及追踪人类及其家畜在地球仪上传播的新方法。通过采用这些技术，我们将能够观察早期狼种群在不同生物组织水平上存在的变异，确定诊断特征，查明哪些祖先狼种群参与了早期狗的驯化，显露出（也可能是基因）与驯化过程有具体联系的特征，并通过时间和空间跟踪这些特征。在我们之前的研究中，成功地使我们能够明确地解开欧洲和远东猪驯化的复杂故事。我们已经证明，猪在欧亚大陆的多个地方被多次驯化，我们生成的数据的精细分辨率也使我们能够揭示猪与早期农民一起穿越欧洲并进入太平洋的迁移路线。通过将这一成功的研究模型应用于古代狗和狼，我们将更深入地了解仍然围绕着狗驯化故事的基本问题。

The shift from hunting and gathering to an agricultural way of life was one of the most profound events in the history of our species and one which continues to impact our existence today. Understanding this process is key to understanding the origins and rise of human civilization. Despite decades of study, however, fundamental questions regarding why, where and how it occurred remain largely unanswered.Such a fundamental change in human existence could not have been possible without the domestication of selected animals and plants. The dog is crucial in this story since it was not only the first ever domestic animal, but also the only animal to be domesticated by hunter-gatherers several thousand years before the appearance of farmers. The bones and teeth of early domestic dogs and their wild wolf ancestors hold important clues to our understanding of how, where and when humans and wild animals began the relationship we still depend upon today. These remains have been recovered from as early as 15,000 years ago in numerous archaeological sites across Eurasia suggesting that dogs were either domesticated independently on several occasions across the Old World, or that dogs were domesticated just once and subsequently spreading with late Stone Age hunter gatherers across the Eurasian continent and into North America. There are also those who suggest that wolves were involved in an earlier, failed domestication experiment by Ice Age Palaeolithic hunters about 32,000 years ago. Despite the fact that we generally know the timing and locations of the domestication of all the other farmyard animals, we still know very little for certain about the origins of our most iconic domestic animal.New scientific techniques that include the combination of genetics and statistical analyses of the shapes of ancient bones and teeth are beginning to provide unique insights into the biology of the domestication process itself, as well as new ways of tracking the spread of humans and their domestic animals around the globe. By employing these techniques we will be able to observe the variation that existed in early wolf populations at different levels of biological organization, identify diagnostic signatures that pinpoint which ancestral wolf populations were involved in early dog domestication, reveal the shape (and possibly the genetic) signatures specifically linked to the domestication process and track those signatures through time and space.We have used this combined approach successfully in our previous research enabling us to definitively unravel the complex story of pig domestication in both Europe and the Far East. We have shown that pigs were domesticated multiple times and in multiple places across Eurasia, and the fine-scale resolution of the data we have generated has also allowed us to reveal the migration routes pigs took with early farmers across Europe and into the Pacific. By applying this successful research model to ancient dogs and wolves, we will gain much deeper insight into the fundamental questions that still surround the story of dog domestication.