Cuando era niño, tenía un perro pequinés llamado Bobby. No es el nombre más original del mundo, pero claro, éramos niños. Hoy en día seguro que le hubiésemos puesto Pikachu o algo así.
Bien, en cualquier caso, lo asombro del asunto es pensar que semejante perro, un pequinés marrón cubierto de pelo, pudiese descender de un lobo. Pues no sólo eso, resulta que el perro actual tuvo su origen hace 15.000 años en lobos de oriente asiático. Lo cuentan en DNA Study Traces Fido’s Family Tree. Es más, parece que los perros europeos y americanos tienen los mismos antepasados. Todo esto gracias al siempre interesante ADN mitocondrial:
Previous research had established the wolf as the ancestor of today’s dog, but when and where humans first domesticated the animals remained unclear. Peter Savolainen of the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and his colleagues examined samples of mitochondrial DNA (which is passed solely through the mother) from 654 dogs representing all major dog populations worldwide. More than 95 percent of the dogs belonged to just three major groups, the team found. What is more, the distribution among these groups was similar across all regions, which suggests «a common origin from a single gene pool for all dog populations,» the authors write. Because the East Asian group displayed the greatest genetic diversity, the scientists posit that dogs were domesticated there first. Prior work had suggested that domesticated dogs came from the Middle East based on archaeological evidence and domestication patterns for other animals.
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