How Domesticated Animals Changed the World - The Darwinian Tourist - page 196

Savolainen favored the 15,000 year date, because at that time no dog fos-
sils more than 14,000 years old had been found anywhere in Europe or Asia.
But there has been a recent dating of a dog skull in Belgium to 33,000 years
ago, which may upend that date and push dog domestication back much fur-
ther. 3 Alternatively, as we will see later, there may have been several earlier
domestications, perhaps including the one in Belgium, that produced tame
dog lineages. It is possible these lineages did not survive.*
The immense value of dogs
Dogs were so useful that they began to accompany their masters around the
world soon after they were domesticated. DNA sequencing and carbon-14 dat-
ing from New World dog burials show that dogs accompanied the fi rst humans
to the New World, perhaps 14,000 years ago. If Savolainen's date is correct, this
means that the migration to the Americas may have taken place not long after
dogs were fi rst domesticated in Asia. The people who traveled across the Ber-
ing Strait may have taken some of the very fi rst dogs with them . 4
Samples of DNA have been obtained from the bones of pre-Columbian
dogs from around the Americas. These lineages remained distinct and did
not mix with local wolves or coyotes. Right from the beginning of their
domestication, dogs tended to live with their human owners and were not
tempted by the call of the wild.
But some of humanity's most extensive migrations took place long
before the domestication of man's best friend. The very longest was the great
migration from Africa across South Asia and into China and Southeast Asia
that began perhaps as early as 100,000 years ago and took as much as 50,000
years (see the next chapter). In the fi nal leg of this migration people crossed
* A recent paper by vonHoldt et al. ( Nature , published online on March 17, 2010) provides
strong evidence that most dog domestications took place in the Middle East about 12,000
years ago. The paper also presents evidence of some contribution from East Asian wolves, in
agreement with the earlier studies. Old dog fossils like the one in Belgium, therefore, may be
traces of earlier domestications that have been lost. Remarkably, herding dogs and dogs that
depend on sight and smell were selected very early in the domestication process, and seem to
have been selected for only once.