UMass Chan Affiliations
Program in Bioinformatics and Integrative BiologyProgram in Molecular Medicine
Document Type
Journal ArticlePublication Date
2018-07-05
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
Few traces remain of the domesticated dogs that populated the Americas before the arrival of Europeans in the 15th century. On page 81 of this issue, Ní Leathlobhair et al. (1) shed light on the origins of the elusive precontact dog population through genetic analysis of ancient and modern dogs. Building on earlier work, they show that American dogs alive today have almost no ancestry from precontact dogs, a monophyletic lineage descended from Arctic dogs that accompanied human migrations from Asia. Instead, the authors found that their closest remaining relative is a global transmissible cancer carrying the DNA of a long-deceased dog. It remains unclear why precontact dogs survived and thrived for thousands of years in the Americas only to swiftly and almost completely disappear with the arrival of Europeans.Source
Science. 2018 Jul 6;361(6397):27-28. doi: 10.1126/science.aau1306. Epub 2018 Jul 5. Link to article on publisher's site
DOI
10.1126/science.aau1306Permanent Link to this Item
http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14038/25855PubMed ID
29976811Related Resources
ae974a485f413a2113503eed53cd6c53
10.1126/science.aau1306