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人类历史上最深刻的事件之一，它继续影响着我们今天的生存。理解这一过程是理解人类文明起源和兴起的关键。然而，尽管经过了几十年的研究，关于它发生的原因、地点和方式的基本问题在很大程度上仍然没有答案。如果没有精选的动物和植物的驯化，人类生存的这种根本变化是不可能发生的。狗在这个故事中起着至关重要的作用，因为它不仅是人类最早驯养的动物，而且是在农民出现前几千年由狩猎采集者驯养的唯一动物。早期家养狗和它们的野狼祖先的骨头和牙齿为我们理解人类与野生动物的关系是如何、何时何地开始的提供了重要线索，我们今天仍然依赖这种关系。这些遗骸早在15000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和北美传播。还有一些人认为狼参与了大约32000年前冰河时代旧石器时代猎人的早期驯化实验，但失败了。尽管我们大致知道所有其他农场动物被驯化的时间和地点，但对于我们最具代表性的家畜的起源，我们仍然知之甚少。新的科学技术，包括遗传学和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全球范围内传播的新方法。通过使用这些技术，我们将能够观察存在于不同生物组织水平上的早期狼种群的变化，识别诊断特征，确定哪些祖先狼种群参与了早期狗的驯化，揭示与驯化过程特别相关的形状（可能还有遗传）特征，并通过时间和空间跟踪这些特征。我们在之前的研究中成功地使用了这种组合方法，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驯化了多次，我们所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和进入太平洋的迁徙路线。通过将这一成功的研究模式应用于古代狗和狼，我们将对围绕狗驯化故事的基本问题有更深入的了解。

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.