The Beatles, now and then.

The last Beatles, Out now, now and then. Now.

This is Scientific American 60 Second Science.

I'm Eine Brough.

Dogs were the first animals to be domesticated and they stuck with us as we changed lifestyles

from hunting gathering to farming to city living.

The dog is a species that is intimately linked to human history.

Anders Bergstrom, a postdoc at the Francis Crick Institute in London.

He and his colleagues studied the genomes of 27 ancient dog bones

dug up around the world. They found that by 11,000 years ago... We see that the dog

to start to diversify genetically, so we find evidence of at least five major

linages of dogs already at this time.

Dog remains have been found in Europe, Asia, and the Americas in a pattern similar to how humans moved and mixed.

To a large degree, the history of dogs seems to have been shaped by human history, so likely reflecting

how when humans moved, they would have brought their dogs with them.

Ancient humans clearly found dogs to be very useful. In the Arctic there's evidence that sled dogs

actually emerged very early and people use them for the particular purpose of sledding

perhaps as early as 10,000 years ago. A few modern breeds like the African Besengi New Guinea

singing dog or Australian dingo are similar to one of the five ancient

lineages.

Most other modern breeds derive at least in part from European dogs which came to dominate

dog genomes.

...