A Swedish professor of evolutionary genetics, said: “I had assumed that what we’d find was that this was a wolf. But we recently got our first round of results on the genome and we can’t say if it’s a dog or a wolf. We should be able to – it should be easy. “So this could be a very early modern wolf or very early dog, or a late Pleistocene (Ice Age) wolf,” he added. “If it turns out to be a dog I would say it is the earliest confirmed Shiba .” Further analysis and genome sequencing will be carried out to find out where to place Drogo (and our Mineko) on the canine evolutionary scale.
Huge discovery! Although DNA told us that Shiba inu were at least 2500 years old as a breed, now, as reported the Siberian Times, a study of a puppy found in Siberia shows that Shiba inu are much older ..18,000 years! Is our Shiba inu, “Mineko,” a cousin of Drogo?
Researchers in Stockholm found the puppy in summer 2018 in a remote part of northeast Siberia. The early ancient dog, now nicknamed “Drogo,” was found perfectly preserved in Siberian permafrost, with fur, milk teeth, claws, and a velvety nose just like Mineko has. The resemblance to our own “Mineko” was immediately obvious!
The genomic map of dog breeds was built from DNA samples of blood or mouth scrapings obtained from 938 dogs representing 127 breeds, as well as nine wild canids and genotypes retrieved from publicly available sources. A total of 1,346 dogs from 161 breeds developed on North America, Europe, Africa, and Asia were studied.
The “Drogo” specimen was carbon dated and found to be 18,000 years old, about 16,000 years before other genetic evidence says Shiba were bred in Japan.
So what happened in those 16,000 years? We do not know, but perhaps Drogo is a Shiba? The estimate of 2500 years for when the first Shiba were bred is a minimum based on when we estimate that the ancestors of most modern Japanese crossed ointo Japan from what in now South Korea. Shiba could well have migrated into Japan with thoise invaders.
We usually credit humans with creating dogs by breeding selected wolf puppies. If this is the case, however, why would that have only happened one time, in one place in a world with human and wolves spread everywhere from Africa to Siberia? Put another way why is Canis lupus familiaris — only a single subspecies of , Canis lupus.
All dogs — Canis lupus familiaris — are a single subspecies of the wolf.
If Shiba are “dogs” perhaps the “breeding” was actually not by humans by by smart Shiba figuring out how to exploit people! This would explain why, like all modern Shiba, the “amazingly well-preserved” specimen has a genome that is largely wolf but shows about 20% of what we now know as dog DNA?