Let’s find out how the dogs that accompany us were domesticated.

When it comes to dogs, what pronouns do you think of: man’s best friend and man’s best companion? But do you know that dogs have been dogs since ancient times? How were the dogs that accompany us today domesticated? Let’s learn more about it with the editor~

Dogs were domesticated from wolves. Robert Weiss and Gallis Vera, evolutionary biologists at the University of California, pointed out that they took DNA specimens from 67 dog species and conducted a series of experiments with DNA taken from 27 species of wolves in Asia, North America, and Europe, as well as animals suspected of being related to dog evolution. They found that dogs carry genes from wolves, so they believe that wolves are the ancestors of dogs.

There has been a debate over which animal the dog's direct ancestor was. There have always been two schools of thought in the academic world: the monistic theory and the pluralistic theory. The monistic theory holds that all dogs of different sizes and shapes in the world today evolved from one animal, the wolf.

The pluralistic theory believes that the current dogs in the world are domesticated from six species of dogs, including wolves, coyotes, jackals, black-backed jackals, side-striped jackals, and Australian dingoes. But most agree with the monistic theory, which can be evidenced by the fact that wolves and dogs still retain some of the same basic characteristics.