Dogs first snuggled up with humans in Central Asia, a new study suggests.
The survey of canine genetic diversity contradicts previous findings about where dogs became domesticated, the researchers report October 19 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“We have a large dataset,” says study coauthor Laura Shannon, an evolutionary geneticist at Cornell University who collaborated with an international team on the project. “We’ve gotten the chance to sample dogs from all over the world.”