Hey, I'm Flor Lichtenen, and you're listening to Science Friday.

For Best in Show at the 149th annual Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, I choose the giant schnowson.

Oh, Monty! He did it. Three years and he finally wins best in show.

It is the best time of the year. The Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show has come again. It starts tomorrow.

Monty won last year, if you're not in the know. More than 200 kinds of canines are going to trot around New York Arena as competing for top dog.

And you might wonder, where did all these breeds come from?

The story that's often told is that dog diversity really took off with the Victorians in the 1800s.

But new research is unleashing a different tale. Here to muddy the waters is Dr. Carly

Amin, author of a recent study in science on the diversification of dogs and a bioarchologist and lecturer

at the University of Exeter in the UK. Okay, Carly, do I have this right that this has been the

prevailing narrative that we largely have the Victorians to thank for breeds?

Yeah, absolutely. There's lots of really interesting work about our relationship with domestic animals, so dogs being some of the ones that are closest to our hearts. But as archaeologists, this is things we're interested, how long these relationships have lasted for.

But there's definitely an aversion by archaeologist to talk about things like breed, because we really feel like it's a very modern phenomenon.

It's a modern way of thinking about the world.

What we think of as a breed today, and if you talk to dog breeders, what they'll tell you a breed today is a really specific set of characteristics that have to do with not just the shape and the size and the coat color, but the stature and the distance between their eyes and ears and the length

of their nose and the way they stand and hold their tail. So these are standards. And that 100% the Victorians begin that, right?

These are the first kennel clubs that we see coming across Europe.

So the UK has one of the oldest kennel clubs in the world.

And they start to write down, this is what makes a boxer, this is what makes a beagle, all these different types of characteristics.

And then they start to intentionally try to continue to replicate that exact form over successive generations. And what we were actually really surprised

about finding in our work when we're looking at 50,000 years of dogs and wolves was how much

diversity there was in the past before the Victorians got to writing it down and trying to make it happen.

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