Arctic-Adapted Dogs Emerged at the Pleistocene-Holocene Transition

We used a palaeogenomic approach to investigate the spatiotemporal emergence of sled dogs. We sequenced the genomes of ten modern Greenland sled dogs, a ~9500 year old Siberian dog associated with archaeological evidence for sled technology, and a ~33,000 year old Siberian wolf. We find that the major ancestry of modern sled dogs traces back to Siberia, where sled dog specific haplotypes of genes that potentially relate to Arctic adaptation were already established by 9500 years ago.