How Much Is That in Dog Years? The Advent of Canine Population Genomics

Imprecision in determining when and where dogs were first domesticated has vexed geneticists for the past 20 years and archaeologists for many decades longer. This has been particularly frustrating since dogs were certainly the first domesticated taxa, so understanding when and where our relationship with dogs began is crucial to comprehending the transition of humans from hunter-gatherers to farmers. Genetic efforts to query the time and place of dog domestication have moved from mtDNA phylogeography through several generations of autosomal marker analysis and now enter an exciting new phase: the interrogation of whole genome sequences. Freedman et al. [1] present one of two recent papers (including Wang et al. [2]) that generate and analyze multiple genomes of dogs and wolves. However, the approaches, sampling, and conclusions differ significantly between the two papers.