From the wolf to your pet: The diversity of dogs has been traced back to the Stone Age

If, like me, you have a spoiled, lazy dog ​​who enjoys cheese-flavored treats, the fact that your pet's ancestors were wild predators may seem incomprehensible.

But a new study suggests that their physical transformation from wolf to fur ball began in the Middle Stone Age, much earlier than we thought.

"When you see a Chihuahua, you know that it's a wolf that has lived with humans for so long that it has been modified," says Alovan Evin of the University of Montpellier, lead researcher on the study.

She and her colleagues discovered that the evolution of our pets, which the Victorians advocated through selective breeding, actually began more than 10.000 years ago.

In a paper published in the journal Science, a team of researchers studied prehistoric dog skulls.

Over more than a decade, they collected, examined, and scanned bones spanning a 50.000-year period of dog evolution.

They created digital 3D models of each of the more than 600 skulls they examined and compared the specific characteristics of ancient and modern dogs and their wild relatives.

This revealed that, almost 11.000 years ago, just after the last ice age, dog skulls began to change shape. While there were still slender, wolf-like dogs, there were also many with shorter snouts and wider, stockier heads.

Carly Amin from the University of Exeter, another lead researcher on the project, explained to BBC News that almost half of the diversity we see in modern dog breeds today was already present in populations of these animals by the mid-Stone Age.

"That's really surprising," she said.

"I'm starting to question the idea that it was the Victorians and their kennel clubs who started this," she says.

Domestication: An Ancient Mystery

Dogs were the first domesticated animals.

There is evidence that humans have lived in close association with dogs for at least 30.000 years.

Where and why this close relationship began remains a mystery.

This study has uncovered some of the earliest physical evidence of how dogs transformed into the diverse types of pets we know today.

And the digital scans of the skulls that the researchers studied will allow them to answer more questions about the evolutionary driving forces of domestication.

Some researchers suggest that humans and wolves met almost by chance, when wolves moved to the outskirts of hunter-gatherer communities to search for food.

Tame wolves would get more food, and people gradually began to rely on wolves to clean up the remains of untidy carcasses and raise the alarm if a predator approached.

As for why this ultimately changed the dogs' physical appearance, there are probably several reasons, says Amin.

"It's probably a combination of interaction with people, adaptation to different environments, adaptation to different types of food - all of which contribute to the diversity we see."

"It's hard to disentangle which of them might be the most important," she adds.

For tens of thousands of years, the stories of humans and dogs have been intertwined.

In another paper in the same issue of the journal Science, Chinese researchers studied ancient DNA from dogs that lived between 9.700 and 870 years ago - at sites across Siberia, the central Eurasian steppe and northwestern China.

They concluded that the movement of domestic dogs through the region often coincided with the migrations of humans - hunter-gatherers, farmers and herders.

So, our dogs have traveled with us and have been integrated into our societies forever.

I can't say that my stubborn, unruly terrier provides me with any of the advantages that the first domesticated wolves gave our ancestors.

But I can understand why, as research shows, once a dog comes for food, there's no going back.

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