Comparing the DNA of dogs and wolves shows that dogs' ability to
easily digest carbohydrates, originally from starch in scraps left
behind by humans, helped enable their domestication, a study finds.
Long ago, some brazen wolves started hanging around human settlements,
jump-starting events that ultimately led to today's domesticated dogs.
Now geneticists say they have identified one of the key changes that
turned wolves into the tame, tail-wagging creatures well-suited to
living by our sides — the ability to digest carbohydrates with ease.
The report, published online Wednesday by the journal Nature, found
signs that dogs can break down starch into sugar, and then transport
those sugars from the gut into the bloodstream, more efficiently than
can wolves. Comparing dog and wolf DNA, the authors pinpointed several
changes in starch and sugar-processing genes that would have made early
dogs better able to digest the scraps they scavenged from dumps in early
farming villages, helping them to thrive as they gave up the
independent life of the pack to entwine their lives with ours.
"That
food was obviously the same kind of food that we were eating," most
likely a mix of roots, porridge and possibly bread along with bones
containing meat and marrow, said study leader Erik Axelsson, an
evolutionary geneticist at Uppsala University in Sweden.
No one
knows for sure when or where the first dogs came to be, but most
evolutionary biologists agree that the wolf probably made the first move
and that the draw was the food humans discarded. Only much later did
people intensively mate dogs of different shapes and temperaments to
create today's hundreds of breeds and varieties, from the hulking and
noble to the tiny and yapping.
The new analysis by Axelsson and
his colleagues examined a mix of DNA from 12 gray wolves and compared it
with DNA collected from 60 domestic dogs, including cocker spaniels,
giant schnauzers, golden retrievers and 11 other breeds.
Taken together, the data fit with the fact that dogs eat more starch
than wolves, Axelsson said. He added that this adaptation would have
allowed the first dogs to get more goodness out of the waste food they
were drawn to at early farming settlements.
"It makes perfect sense that the most efficient scavengers were the wolves that could cope with this starch-rich diet," he said.
Still,
dog domestication may have happened long before humans adopted an
agrarian life about 10,000 years ago, said Robert Wayne, an evolutionary
biologist at UCLA who wasn't involved in the Nature study.
Perhaps
dogs evolved through hanging around hunter-gatherers so they could feed
on leftover carcasses of the mammoths and mastodons our ancestors
killed, Wayne said. In that scenario, the starch-tolerant changes would
have cropped up only after dogs were domesticated, just as genetic
changes that help break down starch evolved in human beings after we
adopted a farming life.
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