If you, like me, have a spoiled, lazy dog that enjoys cheese flavoured treats, the fact that your pet’s ancestors were wild predators can seem unfathomable.But a major new study suggests their physical transformation from wolf to sofa-hogging furball began in the Middle Stone Age, much earlier than we previously thought.”When you see a Chihuahua – it’s a wolf that’s been living with humans for so long that it’s been modified,” says Dr Allowen Evin from the University of Montpellier, a lead researcher on this study.She and her colleagues discovered that the transformation of our pets championed by the Victorians through selective breeding actually started more than 10,000 years ago.In a paper published in the journal Science, this international team of researchers focused their attention on prehistoric canine skulls. Over more than a decade, they collected, examined and scanned bones that spanned a period of 50,000 years of dog evolution.They created digital 3D models of each of the more than 600 skulls they examined – and compared specific features across ancient and modern dogs – and their wild relatives.This revealed that, nearly 11,000 years ago, just after the last ice age, dog skulls started to change shape. While there were still slender, wolf-like dogs, there were also many with shorter snouts and wider, stockier heads.Dr Carly Ameen from the University of Exeter, another lead researcher on this project, explained to BBC News that almost half of the diversity we see in modern dog breeds today was already present in dog populations by the middle of the Stone Age.”It’s really surprising,” she said. “And it starts to challenge the ide …
