TY - JOUR T1 - Ancient European dog genomes reveal continuity since the early Neolithic JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/068189 SP - 068189 AU - Laura R. Botigué AU - Shiya Song AU - Amelie Scheu AU - Shyamalika Gopalan AU - Amanda L. Pendleton AU - Matthew Oetjens AU - Angela M. Taravella AU - Timo Seregély AU - Andrea Zeeb-Lanz AU - Rose-Marie Arbogast AU - Dean Bobo AU - Kevin Daly AU - Martina Unterländer AU - Joachim Burger AU - Jeffrey M. Kidd AU - Krishna R. Veeramah Y1 - 2016/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/08/07/068189.abstract N2 - Europe has played a major role in dog evolution, harbouring the oldest uncontested Palaeolithic remains and having been the centre of modern dog breed creation. We sequenced the whole genomes of an Early and End Neolithic dog from Germany, including a sample associated with one of Europe’s earliest farming communities. Both dogs demonstrate continuity with each other and predominantly share ancestry with modern European dogs, contradicting a Late Neolithic population replacement previously suggested by analysis of mitochondrial DNA and a Late Neolithic Irish genome. However, our End Neolithic sample possesses additional ancestry found in modern Indian dogs, which we speculate may be derived from dogs that accompanied humans from the Eastern European steppe migrating into Central Europe. By calibrating the mutation rate using our oldest dog, we narrow the timing of dog domestication to 20,000-40,000 years ago. Interestingly, the extreme copy number expansion of the AMY2B gene found in modern dogs was not observed in the ancient samples, indicating that the AMY2B copy number increase arose as an adaptation to starch-rich diets after the advent of agriculture in the Neolithic period. ER -