Yamnaya dogs (?)

Just in at bioRxiv:

Abstract: Europe has played a major role in dog evolution, harbouring the oldest uncontested Palaeolithic remains and having been the centre of modern dog breed creation. We sequenced the whole genomes of an Early and End Neolithic dog from Germany, including a sample associated with one of Europe’s earliest farming communities. Both dogs demonstrate continuity with each other and predominantly share ancestry with modern European dogs, contradicting a Late Neolithic population replacement previously suggested by analysis of mitochondrial DNA and a Late Neolithic Irish genome. However, our End Neolithic sample possesses additional ancestry found in modern Indian dogs, which we speculate may be derived from dogs that accompanied humans from the Eastern European steppe migrating into Central Europe. By calibrating the mutation rate using our oldest dog, we narrow the timing of dog domestication to 20,000-40,000 years ago. Interestingly, the extreme copy number expansion of the AMY2B gene found in modern dogs was not observed in the ancient samples, indicating that the AMY2B copy number increase arose as an adaptation to starch-rich diets after the advent of agriculture in the Neolithic period.

And on page 17:

The age of the samples provide a time frame, between ~7,000 and 5,000 years ago, for CTC to obtain its additional Indian­like ancestry component. Considering that CTC shows similar admixture patterns to Central Asian and Middle Eastern modern dog populations, as seen in the PCA (Figure 2) and ADMIXTURE (Supplementary Figure S8.3.2.) analysis, and that the cranium was found next to two individuals associated with the Neolithic Corded Ware Culture, we speculate that the Indian­-like gene flow may have been acquired by admixture with incoming populations of dogs that accompanied steppe people migrating from the East. Moreover, ADMIXTUREGRAPH and ​ f4 statistics support the possibility that the Indian and the wolf ancestry are the consequence of the same admixture event, involving a dog population that carried the two ancestries. This scenario is further supported by the model estimated by G­PhoCS, which infers substantial migration from wolves to the lineage represented by Indian village dogs (and as much as 0.36 migration rate when Indian wolves are included in the tree (Supplementary Methods 12)).

Botigue et al., Ancient European dog genomes reveal continuity since the early Neolithic, bioRxiv, posted August 5, 2016, doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/068189