New Theory Explains Why Europe's Original Dogs Vanished | Hacker News Reader

New Theory Explains Why Europe's Original Dogs Vanished

gizmodo.com

46 pointscurtis11 comments

The dogs didn’t vanish, they were subsumed into the wider dog gene pool, and the closest this article gets to recognizing it is that the european dogs “were replaced in terms of genetic frequency”.

Meanwhile, the original paper’s headline is: “Dogs accompanied humans during the Neolithic expansion into Europe.” Much more straightforward and leads directly with the finding rather than an awkward narrative bolted on top.

could we link directly to the paper here? http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/14/10/2018028...

Any information on which modern breeds are closest to the old European stock?

What would it mean for one modern breed to be "closer" than another to the old stock?

Presumably having more of the genes that remain from the original stock.

That said I’d be pretty surprised if this was significant at the breed level—most breeds are a fraction of the 11kya mentioned here.

> Presumably having more of the genes that remain from the original stock.

That only makes sense if you believe that all "genes" are equally significant. By that metric, a hyrax is more similar to an elephant than it is to a marmot.

Probably fair, I’ve hit the limits of my understanding here.

That does not matter. We want to measure closeness, not superficial similarity. Which species have the most recent common ancestor.

A hyrax is closer to an elephant. It's not even a rodent. Dolphins and whales aren't fish either, even though they live under water and have fins.

Well, in a monophylitic sense, dolphins and whales are fish... as are kangaroos and orangutans. Sarcopterygii, perhaps, but if we're not fish on that basis, then neither are coelacanths and lungfish.

If you want to measure that way, then the idea of one modern breed being closer to a common ancestor than another modern breed is is total nonsense; by definition, they're all equally close.

No they're not. Look at that Nature article linked above.

https://media.nature.com/original/nature-assets/ncomms/2017/...

this contains a whole load of various genetic distance measures between the european samples, ancient and modern dogs, ancient and modern wolves, but no pictures. maybe in the sources for the genome you can find the specimen, there are some Portuguese breed that seem the closest by a wide margin.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com