Latest Domestication Stories
Brett Smith for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A recent genetic analysis has shown that a 33,000-year-old canine skull found in Siberia is more closely related to today’s domestic dogs than the wolves of its time, according to a report in the online journal PLOS ONE. The finding could have major implications for understanding how modern day labradoodles and peekapoos were bred from wild dogs over thousands of years. The skull was first found in 1975 by a team of Russian...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Your family dog is likely to dig through the kitchen trashcan for food if you give him half a chance. It's annoying to live with, but new information shows that this behavior runs deeper than we might know. A new study of dog genetics, led by Uppsala University, reveals that compared to wolves, dogs have numerous genes involved in metabolizing starch. This supports the theory that some dogs emerged from wolves that were able to...
Alan McStravick for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online The dog has been caught unaware by a competitor for man’s affections. And sure, the dog has a strong foothold on its title of ‘Man’s Best Friend’. But this new species angling for the position of top dog and the surreptitious behavior it displays in doing so can only lead one to surmise that this animal is acting, well, like a rat. The reason one might perceive the rat’s march toward domesticity as particularly...
Brett Smith for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Two small figurines discovered near Jerusalem have been dated between 9,000 and 9,500 years ago and support the notion that religion and society played a significant role during the Stone Age. According to a press release by the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), the ram and wild bovine statuettes were found while the authority was excavating near Tel Motza prior to work on the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv highway, a few miles north of...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online New analytical techniques are changing long-held, simplistic views about the evolutionary history of humans in Europe. The study, reported in the journal Trends in Genetics, found that many cultural, climatic, and demographic events have shaped genetic variation among modern-day European populations and that the variety of those mechanisms is more diverse than previously thought. Recent advances in paleogenetics, or the study of...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Turkeys were domesticated more than 1,000 years earlier than previously believed, says a new study from the University of Florida, published online in PLoS ONE this week. Turkeys are one of the most widely consumed birds worldwide, and the discovery of turkey bones in an ancient Mayan archaeological site in Guatemala provides evidence of domestication and the earliest evidence of the Mexican Turkey in the Maya world. Domestication...
Individuals in some species learn information about food, predators, and potential mates indirectly from conspecifics, without taking unnecessary risks by learning directly for themselves (‘social learning’). Sarah Zala and Dustin Penn from the Konrad Lorenz Institute of Ethology of the University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna investigated whether zebrafish use social learning to assess risk (‘boldness/shyness’ behavior). They found that wild zebrafish, which are more timid than...
Brett Smith for redOrbit.com With the world's population expected to jump from 7 billion people this year to an estimated 9 billion by 2050, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations predicts that worldwide food production will need to increase by 70 percent over the next four decades to meet the growing demand. Two new reports published in Nature Genetics provide a window into how the production of corn, or maize, could be modified to ramp up production of the...
Brett Smith for RedOrbit.com The breeding of domestic dogs over thousands of years has made it extremely difficult to trace the genetic roots of man’s best friend, according to a new study led by researchers at Durham University in the U.K. The research team set out to trace the origins of canine domestication, hoping to find a genetic link back to those animals pictured on the walls of Egyptian tombs or Roman ruins. Unfortunately, the genetic pool has been so muddled that they were...
Brett Smith for RedOrbit.com Just two days after the Triple Crown, scientists have determined that domestic horses, like the Kentucky Derby winner “I’ll Have Another,” originated on the grassy plains of modern-day Ukraine, southwest Russia and western Kazakhstan. UK scientists at the University of Cambridge used a genetic database of more than 300 Eurasian horses to trace the origins of domestic breeds, according to their study published in the May 7 edition of the science journal...
Latest Domestication Reference Libraries
The alpaca (Vicugna pacos) is a South American camelid that is similar in appearance to the llama. Its range includes the Andes Mountains, in areas of Ecuador, northern Bolivia and Chile, and southern Peru. It is a domesticated animal that is kept in herds in flat, grassy areas at altitudes of up to 16,000 feet. For many years there was confusion concerning the classification of the four species of South American lamoids, including the alpaca. Until 2001, it was accepted that this species...
Llama, Lama glama The llama (Lama glama) is a domesticated camelid from South America. It is often used as a pack animal or for meat by Andean cultures. Its hair is used to make clothing and handicrafts. The course outer hair is typically used to make lead ropes, rugs, and wall hangings, and the fibers can come in many colors ranging from black to reddish brown to white. Because of transportation and trade of this species, there are now more than 158,000 llamas and 100,000 alpacas in...
The Bactrian camel (Camelus bactrianus), is a large even-toed ungulate native to the steppes of eastern Asia. The Bactrian camel has two humps on its back, in contrast to the Dromedary, also known as the Arabian camel, which has one. For a memory aid the B of Bactrian can be imagined as a graphic of two humps and the D of Dromedary can be imagined as a graphic of one hump. Nearly all of the estimated 1.4 million Bactrian Camels alive today are domesticated, but in October 2002 the...
The Tarpan, Equus ferus ferus, is an extinct species of Eurasian wild horse. The last specimen died in captivity in Ukraine in 1918 or 1919. The Tarpan was first described in 1774 by Johann Friedrich Gmelin, who had first seen the horse in 1769 in the region of Bobrovsk, near Voronezh. Polish farmers often crossed the tarpan with their domestic horses. The result was a small horse breed, the konik. Koniks and other similar horse breeds are now being used to bring back the tarpan from...
The 'Gaur' (pronounced "GOWr")-(Malayalam kattupothu; Bos gaurus, previously Bibos gauris) is a large, dark-coated ox of the hilly areas of South Asia and Southeast Asia, which may be found wild or domesticated. The species is found primarily in India. It is also called the seladang or Indian bison, which is technically incorrect. Wild life experts as the largest of all wild cattle's have recognized the gaur, which is bigger even than Asian wild Water Buffalo and American Bison. A typical...
