The tiny bone fragment seen here was found in Siberia’s Taimyr Peninsula several years ago, and it lead to some surprising insights, as well as extra bragging rights for a few breeds

The study conducted on the fragment (likely a part of a rib) was published back in 2015 in Current Biology, and it included a reconstruction of the bone’s genome, the first draft genome sequence of a Pleistocene carnivore. Lo and behold, scientists found a new species they named the Taimyr Wolf.  High-latitude dogs like the Greenland Sled Dog shares between 1.4 per cent and 27.3 per cent of their ancestry with the wolf’s DNA, but as much as 27 percent of the ancestry of Siberian Husky traces back to the ancient wolf population. 

This changed the thinking of scientists who now know that wolves and dogs split much earlier than thought, and that Siberian Huskies and the Sled Dog are far older than previously believed. That same DNA is also found in Chinese Shar-Pei and the Finnish Spitz making them also related to a population that likely represented the most recent common ancestor between dogs and wolves.

Researchers speculated that the most likely explanation is that Siberian domestic dog populations interbred with local wolves when they followed early human groups into northern latitudes, and because these breeds lived where they did, it was beneficial for them to absorb genes that were adapted to a high Arctic environment.

The study’s authors were geneticists from Harvard and the University of Stockholm, and among their findings was that the mutation rate for the ancient wolf genome was “substantially slower than assumed by most previous studies.” This suggested that the ancestors of dogs were separated from present-day wolves before the Last Glacial Maximum.

It’s sobering to know that a portion of the Siberian Husky genome traces back exclusively to an ancient Siberian wolf that roamed the tundra 35,000 years ago. For more on this, click here.