Dogs did not come from today's grey wolves but from a vanished wolf lineage
For decades biologists assumed dogs were tamed grey wolves. A 2014 study overturned that: dogs descend from an extinct population of Ice Age wolves, and today's grey wolf is a cousin, not a parent. Their resemblance owes much to later interbreeding, with dog genes flowing into wolves.
The dog was the first animal humans domesticated and remains the only large carnivore ever tamed, well before farming. Only around 11,400 years ago did people in the Near East start forming ties with wild aurochs, boar, sheep and goats. Genetic estimates put the split between the dog's ancestors and modern wolves between 20,000 and 40,000 years ago, near the Last Glacial Maximum, but that marks an upper limit rather than the moment of taming. Horses show why the distinction matters: their lineage split from Przewalski's horse around 45,000 years ago, yet domestic horses appear in the archaeological record only 5,500 years ago.
The first undisputed dog is the Erralla dog from the Basque Country, about 17,500 years old. Remains from Siberia's Altai Mountains and a Belgian cave, roughly 33,000 years old, remain contested. Magdalenian hunters seem to have carried their dogs across Western Europe as the ice retreated, since all Palaeolithic dogs there share one maternal lineage with Erralla, including the Bonn–Oberkassel dog buried alongside people 14,500 years ago. A 2021 review proposed instead that taming began in Siberia 26,000 to 19,700 years ago among Ancient North Eurasians, though no dog bones from there have yet been found.
Why a wolf? Some ancestral wolves were less fearful and aggressive and friendlier towards people, and those animals prospered alongside them. That makes the dog a textbook case of social selection rather than deliberate breeding. The ancient wolves themselves were robust bone-crackers with broken teeth like hyenas, and their maternal lineages are missing from modern wolves.
Around 25,000 years ago grey wolves went through a severe bottleneck, and a single population then spread out of Beringia to replace the rest. It probably did not produce dogs, but it did mix with them, passing on coat colour genes that also affect immunity. By 11,700 years ago, five distinct dog lineages had already emerged, one of which survives in the New Guinea singing dog.
Source: Domestication of the dog
