I've suggested this in the past: Humans may have
invented wolves!
The thing is, by domesticating some wolves and
turning them into dogs, our ancestors were
automatically making wolves more aggressive.
How?
Because we appear to have domesticated THE LEAST
AGGRESSIVE. If they were aggressive they were killed.
Right?
That's what you do to a deadly animal that is a threat to
you: You kill it.
So if you're turning on into a pet, it's not very aggressive.
And by drawing off the animals with THE LEAST aggressive
traits, the MOST AGGRESSIVE traits are just going to keep
breeding...
Anyhow, there's another side to this.
The animals remain capable of breeding with each other.
Remember Mungo Man? The 40+ thousand year old
Australian with an extinct mtDNA line, one significantly
older than any "Mitochondrial Eve?"
So the population Mungo Man came from, the one that
carried that extremely old mtDNA line: They left BILLIONS
of descendants alive today. But we'd have no way of
ever knowing that if it weren't for a lucky mutation where
that Mungo Man mtDNA (or a version of it, not his exactly)
got copied over to the nuclear DNA.
Do you see where I'm going with this?
An event similar to the one which now hides the Mungo
Man ancestry of billions of people could have occured
with wolves.
It very well may have been a case where humans
domesticated animals, created a new population in a
manner of speaking, and then that new population drowned
out the uniquely wild DNA.
I mean, look here:
https://www.livescience.com/mummified-ice-age-pup.html
It's a wolf pup, but it's DNA doesn't seem to belong to wolves
or dogs. So maybe, just maybe it's amongst the very last of
the truly wild wolves. That, domestication produced a
genetically unique (from the wild population) animal and
then through prolonged interbreeding -- because they could
still interbreed -- the uniqueness of the wild population was
being lost. And this pup is from a population that had not
lost that uniqueness, maybe even the last population to
retain it's uniqueness...
I dunno.
I couldn't find any hard statements much less data on the
DNA finding, not even during an exhaustive 30 second
Google search, so I don't know HOW it differs from modern
dogs or wolves...
Just speculating, but it would be a way of explaining the
animals genetic uniqueness. Not that it's from Mars but,
like Mungo Man, it's genetic uniqueness was bred out of
it over some millennia.
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https://jtem.tumblr.com/post/678200964744904704
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