Australian dingos (Canis lupus dingo) descended from wild dogs and were never domesticated according to an analysis of their genome.
So, what’s the “really significant difference”? One is their ability to digest and utilize starches as a food source.
One major difference is that domestic dogs have evolved multiple copies of a gene called AMY2B that allows digestion of starchy foods. This is probably because they began eating rice after humans domesticated the crop around 10,000 years ago. Dingoes, in contrast, have a low-starch diet that mainly comprises marsupials and reptiles, and only have a single copy of this gene, similar to wolves and some Arctic dog breeds.
So dogs are not wolves, and dingoes are somewhere in between -- perhaps the “missing link” or proto-wolf from which today's dogs descended.
Fore more on dogs, wolves, and AMY2B see >> Science Proves the Obvious from this blog (2013).
Also see:
- Diet adaptation in dog reflects spread of prehistoric agriculture
- Amy2B copy number variation reveals starch diet adaptations in ancient European dogs
- Dietary Variation and Evolution of Gene Copy Number among Dog Breeds
- Feed Me Like a Zoo Wolf
- A Dog is Not a Wolf
2 comments:
Dogs may not be phenotypically the same as today's holoarctic gray wolf but dogs are 100% Canis Lupus. The difference genetically between dogs and wolves is exactly the same as the difference between 2 random humans. Tibetans have evolved to thrive at high altitude, Inuit people can survive on high fat diet and Maasai thrive on blood and milk almost exclusively; genetic difference in diet tolerance is not a marker of speciation! The difference between dogs and wolves is embodied in human emotion and semantics- it seems to be very important to some of us that they be different species...
Do you own a wolf and a dog?
I ask because the people who **do** own wolves AND dogs *know* a wolf is not a dog.
Dogs and wolves seem to know it too, which is why wolves eat dogs when they meet in the woods.
You would think if dogs are wolves, then random bred dogs would devolve back to wolves.
But guess what? They don’t.
The world over, they devolve back to pariah dogs or pye dogs, which are very clearly *not* wolves in looks or action.
Dogs and wolves have different estrus cycles, pack structures, dominance signals, communication mechanisms, diets, etc.
And, of course, there are many species of wolves. The notion that dogs are descended from arctic wolves is not much supported.
But, of course, there are always folks who demand that dogs be wolves, no matter that the animals themselves disagree, the people who actually own both animals disagree, and that devolution of dogs to pariah dogs proves the fallacy.
Go figure.
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