Starchy diet may have transformed wolves to dogs

Even the most illustrious canine breeds can probably trace their heritage to junkyard dogs.

That’s the conclusion of a new study aimed at finding the genetic changes that transformed wild wolves into domesticated dogs. Dogs can digest carbohydrates better than wolves can, and gaining that ability may have been an important step in taming the animals, evolutionary geneticist Erik Axelsson of Uppsala University in Sweden and his colleagues report online January 23 in Nature.