Ice Age man could take five breeds of dog for a walk

MAN and dog have been best friends for so long that by the end of the Ice Age there were five different types of dog, researchers have found.

Diversity among dogs first developed while humans were still hunters and gatherers, according to a study conducted by Oxford University’s Francis Crick Institute.

After molecular evidence t hat showed all dogs descended from the grey wolf around 130,000 years ago, the new findings have shed light on how different lineages developed.

Dogs were domesticated around 15,000 years ago and spread across large parts of the world within 4,000 years, according to Dr Anders Bergström, a researcher at the institute’s ancient genomics laboratory and the study’s lead author.

“We can see in the genomes that by at least 11,000 years ago, they had already started to diversify into distinct lineages,” he told The Daily Telegraph.

“We don’t really know how dogs were able to spread so quickly across the world, but by the end of the Ice Age dogs were already present throughout much of the Northern Hemisphere.”

He said it was still “a bit of a mystery” how dogs dispersed so rapidly without any large-scale human migrations, but they none the less developed different genetic profiles on different continents.

Scientists also found that dogs have become l ess genetically diverse throughout Europe, with ancient European animals having displayed much

‘By the end of the Ice Age dogs were already present throughout much of the Northern Hemisphere’

greater diversity than dogs today.

Dr Bergström added that “there is a correlation” between the different histories of dogs and humans, although these occasionally diverged when humans migrated without their fourlegged friends in tow. “Dogs would often follow humans as humans moved and migrated and mixed in different parts of the world,” he said.

The findings were published in the journal Science.