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Originally Posted by Abby08  I recall a few years back that some scientist supposedly researched the DNA of dogs and wolves and found that dogs were truely decended from wolves. However, I am thinking that I also read some where that DNA results in dogs get really hard to determine which breed the origional breeding pair belong to if they are 3 generations from the origional parents and mixed.
So how does the scientist determine that dogs are from wolves if the parentage gets murky so fast ? Makes me wonder about some of the scientific findngs. |
Abbey08, I have wondered about that too, and I would be interested to read anything that explained it in layman terms. I sort of know about other ways that DNA can be tracked - for instance, dogs and wolves might have the same type of mitochondria. I believe that these are always passed from the mother in primates (and all other species??), and that's where a lot of information about humanity's origin comes from.
Sometimes I see on Animal Planet that ridge backs are supposedly descended from some type of African wild dog type, or that chihuahuas are from foxes, but that makes no sense to me, since all dogs can breed, meaning that there must be one source species.
It is pretty amazing to look at Thor, a 4 pound yorkie with silver hair, and imagine that his genes came from wolves. Says a lot about the diversity of the genome!