Modern wolves trace their origin to a late Pleistocene expansion from Beringia

Grey wolves (Canis lupus) are one of the few large terrestrial carnivores that have maintained a wide geographic distribution across the Northern Hemisphere throughout the Pleistocene and Holocene. Both the geographic origin of the ancestral population and how it becamewidespread remain a mystery. Here we analysed a large dataset of novel modern and ancient mitochondrial wolf genomes, spanning the last 50,000 years, using a spatially and temporally explicit modelling framework to show that contemporary wolf populations across the globe trace their ancestry to an expansion from Beringia at the end of the Last Glacial Maximum.