This is Scientific American's 60 Second Science.

I'm Christopher Intagiyata.

In Jack London's The Call of the Wild, a pet dog named Buck winds up in the Yukon,

where he succumbs to his desire to return to his wild cousins, the wolves.

It's hard to say no to that call, isn't it Buck?

It's all right boy.

Go ahead.

Of course Buck himself was the descendant of wolves, wolves that lived more than 10,000 years ago.

At this time people would have been hunting and gathering.

Laurent France, a geneticist at the University of Oxford in the UK.

At the time, he says, humans roamed across Eurasia.

They would eat...

And store scraps around their settlement which attract wildlife, wildlife like wolves. and those

the scraps around the settlement which attract wildlife.

Wildlife like wolves. Over time a split would have appeared in wolf populations, he says.

Those wolves that feared humans and those that didn't.

So this would have facilitated, I think, the domestication process.

At which point humans deliberately took wolves as pets.

But that domestication process, France says,

may have happened more than once, first in the West, in Europe, and again in the Far East, in Asia. France and his colleagues analyze the DNA from a 4,800-year-old Irish dogs earbone, along with the genomes of hundreds of other modern and ancient dogs.

After building a family tree, they determined that dogs could have been first domesticated in Europe, at least 15,000 years ago.

But the data also point to another domestication in East Asia, more than 13,000 years ago.

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