Did all dogs descend from the wolf and at what point in time did dog ancestors begin to appear on the planet?
The Egyptians were likely responsible for the domestication of cats, but dogs were probably domesticated before Egypt was really settled. DNA evidence makes it clear that dogs evolved from wolves, but not necessarily in the process of domestication. My source is from Science magazine, a copy of which is linked below. In fact, all canid species (including wolves, jackals, and coyotes) have close enough DNA that they can still interbreed, and there probably wasn’t a single “dog’ event. Wolves and dogs probably interbred for a very long time. But the DNA analysis makes it clear that it’s just wolves in the blood line, not foxes or jackals. The European dogs we think of as “dogs” are descended from wolves, but they may have evolved the modern dog features before being domesticated. DNA evidence in fact suggests that the dogs go back 135,000 years, long before humans were in a position to domesticate them. Fossil dogs finally show up in the record alongside human civilization all over Europ
The question was answered by Marilyn vos Savant recently in Parade Magazine: “Dogs have genes that affect the timing, rate and length of development of their separate body parts, which allows great variety. For example, the dog’s muzzle may start to form earlier or later, proceed fast or slowly, and take a short or long time. As the head, eyes and ears also are developing during this period—on their own schedules too—all of these elements come together in different ways. No other species can produce such a kaleidoscope of forms.” This gives you a “how” but unfortunately not a “when” but at least it adds to the plausibility. Here’s another quote from the net: “The dog is part of a family of similar animals that include wolves, coyotes, foxes, jackals and wild hunting dogs such as the Dingo and African Wild Hunting Dog, who all share common characteristics. Many of these wild dogs have been claimed to be the domestic dog’s wild ancestor but the exact origins of the dog and domestication
After all, archeological evidence depends on the chances of finding drawings or some other artifacts indicating domestication of the dog. The genetic data is is all right there. The abstract of the article is: “Mitochondrial DNA control region sequences were analyzed from 162 wolves at 27 localities worldwide and from 140 domestic dogs representing 67 breeds. Sequences from both dogs and wolves showed considerable diversity and supported the hypothesis that wolves were the ancestors of dogs. Most dog sequences belonged to a divergent monophyletic clade sharing no sequences with wolves. The sequence divergence within this clade suggested that dogs originated more than 100,000 years before the present. Associations of dog haplotypes with other wolf lineages indicated episodes of admixture between wolves and dogs. Repeated genetic exchange between dog and wolf populations may have been an important source of variation for artificial selection.” BTW, the papers also shows that, genetically
This article say: Several 10-15,000 year old archaeological finds in Eastern Europe and the Middle East of domestic dog-looking canids indicate that the dog was the first domestic animal. Apart from this, however, archaeological studies have not produced any detailed facts about the origin of the domestic dog. Such basic questions as the number of founding events, and where and when these occurred, have remained unsolved. To address these questions we initiated a study of mtDNA sequence variation among domestic dogs, based on our comprehensive collection of more than 1,000 DNA samples from dogs from most parts of the world. We could thereby show that the geographic variation of mtDNA among domestic dogs indicate that the dog originates from East Asia, probably about 15,000 years ago (9, note link to article).
