The emergence and diversification of dog morphology

TL;DR

This study uses 3D morphometrics to trace the origin and early diversification of dog morphology over 50,000 years, revealing that distinctive dog features appeared around 11,000 years ago and diversified early in the Holocene.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed timeline of dog morphological emergence and diversification using a large dataset of canid skulls spanning 50,000 years.

Findings

Distinctive dog morphology appeared around 11,000 years ago.

Early Holocene dogs already showed significant phenotypic diversity.

Modern breed diversity is a recent development, predating the 19th century.

Abstract

Dogs exhibit an exceptional range of morphological diversity as a result of their long-term association with humans. Attempts to identify when dog morphological variation began to expand have been constrained by the limited number of Pleistocene specimens, the fragmentary nature of remains, and difficulties in distinguishing early dogs from wolves on the basis of skeletal morphology. In this study, we used three-dimensional geometric morphometrics to analyze the size and shape of 643 canid crania spanning the past 50,000 years. Our analyses show that a distinctive dog morphology first appeared at about 11,000 calibrated years before present, and substantial phenotypic diversity already existed in early Holocene dogs. Thus, this variation emerged many millennia before the intense human-mediated selection shaping modern dog breeds beginning in the 19th century.