Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

FillsYourNiche OP t1_jdsf30k wrote

Reply to comment by [deleted] in TIL African wild dogs use sneezes to cast their vote on whether they are ready to begin a hunt. Researchers noted a minimum number of sneezes required to rally the group, with sneezes from dominant individuals worth more than other dogs. by FillsYourNiche

So dogs are not evolved from grey wolves they are sister taxa, they share a common ancestor (Scientific American). African wild dogs also share the same common ancestor.

From the article:

> Analyzing whole genomes of living dogs and wolves, last January's study revealed that today's Fidos are not the descendants of modern gray wolves. Instead the two species are sister taxa, descended from an unknown ancestor that has since gone extinct. “It was such a long-standing view that the gray wolf we know today was around for hundreds of thousands of years and that dogs derived from them,” says Robert Wayne, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “We're very surprised that they're not.” Wayne led the first genetic studies proposing the ancestor-descendant relationship between the two species and more recently was one of the 30 co-authors of the latest study, published in PLOS Genetics, that debunked that notion.

2