Hello,
1/ Is the domestic dog descended from the Stomarctus? Everyone tells me the dog is descended from the Canus Lupus.
However, could it not be that the dog and the former wolf parted ways at some point? The then wolf further evolved in the wild into the current wolf, the dog has gone to man as an outcast.
If this is the case, then the dog is not really a descendant of the wolf, but they evolved from each other at some point.
2/ A second question. A greyhound is a very special dog. The composition of the blood, the construction, the ability to acidify are so different from that of an ‘ordinary’ dog. Could the greyhound be descended from the Cynodesmus?
friendly thanks.
Answer
Best,
All dog breeds originated from the Canus lupus, or wolf, via domestication. It is not entirely certain when domestication began, but the oldest fossil remains of domestic dogs date from well over 10,000 years ago. It is possible that it is even longer ago, but certainly no longer than 100,000 years ago. In this span of time, the wolf has hardly changed because evolution through natural selection is not that fast. In the domestic dog, humans intensively selected for certain traits (eg from hunting dog to shepherd, must not have been easy!). But all dog breeds still belong to the same species, Canus lupus. Although they are placed in a separate subspecies, Canus lupus familiaris, their very strong affinity with the wolf is shown, among other things, by the fact that dog and wolf can still be crossed. Biologically speaking, they therefore still belong to the same species (by definition, different animal species cannot interbreed).
Answered by
prof. Dr. Luke Bouwens
Biomedical Sciences
Pleinlaan 2 1050 Ixelles
http://www.vub.ac.be/
.