科学美国人60秒:From Wolf to Woof Twice

From Wolf to Woof Twice
从 狼 到“汪”是肿么回事

In Jack London's The Call of the Wild, a pet dog named Buck winds up in the Yukon… where he succumbs to his desire to return to his wild cousins…the wolves. [Call of the Wild clip: "It's hard to say no to that call, isn't it Buck? It's all right boy. Go ahead."]
在杰克·伦敦的小说《野性的呼唤》中，一只叫做巴克的宠物狗结束了自己的宠物生涯，被迫回到狼群中……(节选片段：很难拒绝那样的呼唤，对吧，巴克!好了，走吧!)

Of course, Buck himself was the descendant of wolves. Wolves that lived more than 10,000 years ago. "At this time people would have been hunting and gathering." Laurent Frantz, a geneticist at the University of Oxford in the U.K. Humans roamed across Eurasia. They would eat, "and throw scraps around their settlement. Which attracts wildlife." Wildlife like wolves.
毋庸置疑，巴克本身是狼的后代。狼群的历史已有1万多年。“那时候人们是群居过着打猎的生活。” 洛朗·弗朗茨是英国牛津大学的遗传学家。人类横跨了欧亚大陆。人们吃饭，并并残羹扔到部落的周围，这就会招来野生动物，如狼群。

Over time a split would have appeared in wolf populations, he says: those wolves that feared humans, and those that didn't. "So this would have facilitated, I think, the domestication process." At which point humans deliberately took wolves as pets. But that domestication process, Frantz says, may have happened more than once: first in the west, in Europe. And again in the far east, in Asia.
随着时间的推移，狼群中就会产生分歧。“惧怕人群的狼群和肆无忌惮的狼群。我认为这就促进了狼群的驯化过程。曾经人类故意将狼驯化为宠物。弗朗茨表示，这样的驯化过程曾经发生过不只一次，首先是在西方，在欧洲;之后在遥远的东方，亚洲。

Frantz and his colleagues analyzed the DNA from a 4,800-year-old Irish dog's ear bone, along with the genomes of hundreds of other modern and ancient dogs. After building a family tree, they determined that dogs could have been first domesticated in Europe, at least 15,000 years ago. But the data also point to another domestication in East Asia, more than 13,000 years ago. Sometime after that, they say, humans from East Asia wandered to Europe… and brought their dogs with them. Leading to a mixing of the two populations. The study appears in the journal Science.
弗朗茨和同事们分析了4800年前爱尔兰狗耳骨，以及数千只现代狗和古代狗的基因组。在创建家谱之后，他们认为至少是在15,000年前，狗首次在欧洲被人类驯化。但是数据也显示在13,000多年前，东亚也曾经存在驯化行为。之后，他们认为东亚人来到了欧洲，并带来了驯化的狗。这导致两个种群的混合。该研究结果发表在《科学》杂志上。

Frantz says most purebred dog breeds trace their origins to the 1800s. But as this study reminds us—if you go back far enough, all dogs are mutts.
弗朗茨表示，最纯种狗的起源可以追溯到19世纪。但是该研究结果提醒我们——如果你追溯到足够远，就会发现所有的狗都是杂交。