Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
for such a domestication would be the half-wild pariah dogs or pye dogs that
swarm India's cities and countryside. But pye dogs are not Indian in origin.
They are merely another of the many dog lineages that have descended from
East Asian wolves.
It is possible that Indian wolves are simply more dii cult to tame than
Asiatic wolves. But there is another intriguing possibility. Perhaps lineages
of dogs were indeed domesticated from Indian wolves, but were then sup-
planted by more useful breeds arriving from western Asia, just as the Maori
dogs of New Zealand seem to have been replaced by European breeds. It will
be worth examining DNA from dog bones found in the Indian archeological
record to see whether Indian wolves might have been domesticated in the
past.
Such a scenario is not entirely far-fetched. Breeds of dog, like human
tribes, can go extinct. As we saw, Maori dogs disappeared shortly after the
arrival of Europeans, though they may have left some of their genes behind.
And the dogs that accompanied the fi rst humans from Asia to the Americas
Figure 90
The behavior of this New Zealand sheep dog will soon be understood at the
genetic level.
