382

30

Domestication

perhaps their most fascinating aspect. A recent large-scale study gathered behavioural

data for almost 50,000 dogs, ⁶ and much insight has emerged, such as there being only

ten behaviourally distinct lineages. It has also been shown that breed diversification

is predominantly driven by noncoding regulatory variation, as might, perhaps, have

been intuitively perceived.

Another fascinating example of the application of comparative genomics in the

field of domestication is the recent examination of dogs abandoned by their own-

ers when they were forced to evacuate Chernobyl in 1986 and 1990. ⁷ These dogs

became stray, then feral yet, behaviourally, remain distinct from ordinary wild dogs.

It is recently been demonstrated that there are genetic differences between the two

groups of dogs, ⁸ the origin of which presumably lies in the low-level radioactivity

characteristic of the environs of the disaster-stricken nuclear power plant. Hence, this

pioneering study provides important insight to the wider problem of survival under

conditions of unnaturally elevated radioactivity.

References

Alberto FJ et al (2018) Nature Commun 9:813

Allaby RG, Kitchen JL, Fuller DQ (2015) Surprisingly low limits of selection in plant domestication.

Evol Bioinf Online 11(Suppl 2):41–51

Dutrow EV, Serpell JA, Ostrander EA (2022) Domestic dog lineages reveal genetic drivers of

behavioral diversification. Cell 185:4737–4755

Freedman AH et al (2014) Genome sequencing highlights the dynamic early history of dogs. PLoS

Genet 10:e1004016

Lorenz K (1965) So kam der Mensch auf den Hund. Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, Munich

Moyers PT, Morrell PL, McKay JK (2018) J Heredity 109:103–116

Spatola GJ et al (2023) The dogs of Chernobyl: demographic insights into populations inhabiting

the nuclear exclusion zone. Sci Adv 9 (in press)

Thomas P (2018) Responding after a big nuclear accident. Nanotechnol Percept 14:69–79

Wright D (2015) The genetic architecture of domestication in animals. Bioinf Biol Insights 9(Suppl

4):11–20

6 Dutrow et al. (2022).

7 Thomas (2018).

8 Spatola et al. (2023).