Modern Siberian dog ancestry was shaped by several thousand years of Eurasian-wide trade and human dispersal

Research output: Contribution to journalJournal articleResearchpeer-review

  • Alberto Carmagnini
  • Robert J. Losey
  • Tatiana Nomokonova
  • Arthur Askeyev
  • Igor Askeyev
  • Oleg Askeyev
  • Ekaterina E. Antipina
  • Martin Appelt
  • Olga P. Bachura
  • Fiona Beglane
  • Daniel G. Bradley
  • Kevin G. Daly
  • Kristian Murphy Gregersen
  • Chunxue Guo
  • Andrei V. Gusev
  • Carleton Jones
  • Pavel A. Kosintsev
  • Yaroslav V. Kuzmin
  • Valeria Mattiangeli
  • Angela R. Perri
  • Andrei V. Plekhanov
  • Anne Lisbeth Schmidt
  • Dilyara Shaymuratova
  • Oliver Smith
  • Lilia V. Yavorskaya
  • Greger Larson
  • Love Dalén
  • Laurent Frantz

Dogs have been essential to life in the Siberian Arctic for over 9,500 y, and this tight link between people and dogs continues in Siberian communities. Although Arctic Siberian groups such as the Nenets received limited gene flow from neighboring groups, archaeological evidence suggests that metallurgy and new subsistence strategies emerged in Northwest Siberia around 2,000 y ago. It is unclear if the Siberian Arctic dog population was as continuous as the people of the region or if instead admixture occurred, possibly in relation to the influx of material culture from other parts of Eurasia. To address this question, we sequenced and analyzed the genomes of 20 ancient and historical Siberian and Eurasian Steppe dogs. Our analyses indicate that while Siberian dogs were genetically homogenous between 9,500 to 7,000 y ago, later introduction of dogs from the Eurasian Steppe and Europe led to substantial admixture. This is clearly the case in the Iamal-Nenets region (Northwestern Siberia) where dogs from the Iron Age period (∼2,000 y ago) possess substantially less ancestry related to European and Steppe dogs than dogs from the medieval period (∼1,000 y ago). Combined with findings of nonlocal materials recovered from these archaeological sites, including glass beads and metal items, these results indicate that Northwest Siberian communities were connected to a larger trade network through which they acquired genetically distinctive dogs from other regions. These exchanges were part of a series of major societal changes, including the rise of large-scale reindeer pastoralism ∼800 y ago.

Original languageEnglish
Article numbere2100338118
JournalProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
Volume118
Issue number39
ISSN0027-8424
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2021

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.

    Research areas

  • Arctic, Dogs, Palaeogenomics, Population genetics

Number of downloads are based on statistics from Google Scholar and www.ku.dk


No data available

ID: 281278442