It might be hard to believe that a creature that insists on following you into the bathroom descended from wolves. It might be even harder to believe that said creature still carries wolf DNA today.
A new study conducted by researchers from the American Museum of Natural History and Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History has found that nearly two-thirds of modern breed dogs have wolf ancestry.
“Modern dogs, especially pet dogs, can seem so removed from wolves, which are often demonized,” says the study’s lead author, Audrey Lin. “But there are some characteristics that may have come from wolves that we greatly value in dogs today and that we choose to keep in their lineage. This is a study about dogs, but in a lot of ways, it’s telling us about wolves.”
“Prior to this study, the leading science seemed to suggest that in order for a dog to be a dog, there can’t be very much wolf DNA present, if any,” Lin continues. “But we found if you look very closely in modern dog genomes, wolf is there. This suggests that dog genomes can ‘tolerate’ wolf DNA up to an unknown level and still remain the dogs we know and love.”
As you might expect, larger working dogs, such as Arctic sled dogs and hunting dogs, have the most wolf ancestry. Perhaps a bit more surprising is that the tiny chihuahua contains about 0.2% wolf ancestry.
“This completely makes sense to anyone who owns a chihuahua,” Lin says. “And what we’ve found is that this is the norm—most dogs are a little bit wolfy.”