How certain is dog domestication dating?

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SUMMARY

The domestication of dogs is estimated to have occurred between 9,000 and 34,000 years ago, with archaeological evidence indicating the presence of distinct large canids around 32,000 years before present (B.P.). The discussion highlights the challenges in accurately dating domestication events due to varying mutation rates in genetic studies, as noted by population geneticist David Reich. The reliability of genetic estimates is questioned, emphasizing the need for a multidisciplinary approach that includes archaeological and anthropological evidence to corroborate findings.

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  • Understanding of genetic mutation rates and their implications in evolutionary biology.
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  • Knowledge of anthropological perspectives on domestication and human-animal relationships.
  • Awareness of the concept of the "molecular clock" in genetics.
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  • Research the methodologies used in estimating mutation rates in canids.
  • Explore archaeological evidence supporting dog domestication timelines.
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Anthropologists, geneticists, archaeologists, and anyone interested in the evolutionary history of domesticated animals, particularly dogs.

Blackberg
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I'm mostly trained as a physicist, so I'm wondering, on a scale from crackpot (1) to imressive (9), where does this hypothesis rank to an anthropologist?

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1040618214002729?showall=true&via=ihub

"I hypothesize that this innovation may have been facilitated by an early attempted domestication of dogs, as indicated by a group of genetically and morphologically distinct large canids which first appear in archaeological sites at about 32 ka B.P. (uncal)."
 
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Blackberg said:
I'm mostly trained as a physicist, so I'm wondering, on a scale from crackpot (1) to imressive (9), where does this hypothesis rank to an anthropologist?

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1040618214002729?showall=true&via=ihub

"I hypothesize that this innovation may have been facilitated by an early attempted domestication of dogs, as indicated by a group of genetically and morphologically distinct large canids which first appear in archaeological sites at about 32 ka B.P. (uncal)."
So, what are you trying to propose?

Dogs were domesticated between 9,000 and 34,000 years ago

http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/2014/01/study-narrows-origin-dogs
 
Evo said:
Dogs were domesticated between 9,000 and 34,000 years ago
http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/2014/01/study-narrows-origin-dogs

It's worth noting that estimating dates from DNA sequences (as the PLoS Genetics paper you are citing does) can often lead to vastly different estimates depending on the exact methods used. From the Nature news piece:

Last year, population geneticist David Reich of Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, and his colleagues compared the genome of a 45,000-year-old human from Siberia with genomes of modern humans and came up with the lower mutation rate2. Yet just before the Leipzig meeting, which Reich co-organized with Kay Prüfer of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, his team published a preprint article3 that calculated an intermediate mutation rate by looking at differences between paired stretches of chromosomes in modern individuals (which, like two separate individuals’ DNA, must ultimately trace back to a common ancestor). Reich is at a loss to explain the discrepancy. “The fact that the clock is so uncertain is very problematic for us,” he says. “It means that the dates we get out of genetics are really quite embarrassingly bad and uncertain.”
(emphasis mine)

Now, a lot of careful work has been done calibrating the human "molecular clock," but it's unclear whether similar careful work has been done on dogs to see, for example, whether mutation rates have changed throughout history in various dog and wolf populations. Work in this area is certainly still evolving and dates estimated from genetic evidence alone should invite skepticism. Such estimates must take into account archaeological, anthropological, and other forms of evidence as well.
 
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