科學家:是狗還是狼?

俄羅斯科學家在西伯利亞東部雅庫茨克附近發(fā)現(xiàn)了一具1.8萬年前犬類的冰凍遺骸，但這只小狗的神秘起源卻令人費解。

Despite the fossil being uncommonly well-preserved — with its nose, fur and teeth still intact — geneticists can’t decide one thing: Is the specimen a dog or a wolf?

盡管這具化石保存異常完好——鼻子、皮毛和牙齒仍然完好無損——但遺傳學家們無法確定一件事:這個標本是狗還是狼?

Radiocarbon dating of a rib bone by experts from Sweden’s Centre for Palaeogenetics reveals the animal’s age, but further DNA testing has not definitively confirmed its canine species.

來自瑞典古遺傳學中心的專家對一根肋骨進行了放射性碳測年，發(fā)現(xiàn)了這只動物的年齡，但進一步的DNA測試還沒有最終確定它屬于犬類。

“It’s normally relatively easy to tell the difference between the two,” says David Stanton, a researcher at the center.

該中心的研究員大衛(wèi)·斯坦頓說:“通常來說，很容易就能分辨出兩者的區(qū)別。”

“We have a lot of data from it already, and with that amount of data, you’d expect to tell if it was one or the other. The fact that we can’t might suggest that it’s from a population that was ancestral to both — to dogs and wolves,” Stanton tells CNN.

“我們已經(jīng)從它那里獲得了大量數(shù)據(jù)，有了這么多數(shù)據(jù)，你就能知道是哪一個了。但事實上，我們不能認定為它來自于哪一個祖先——狗或是狼。”斯坦頓告訴CNN。

For now, researchers have dubbed their discovery Dogor, the Yakut word for “friend.”

目前，研究人員將他們的發(fā)現(xiàn)命名為Dogor，雅庫特語中的“朋友”一詞。

Stanton explains that the period in which Dogor lived is “a very interesting time in terms of wolf and dog evolution.”

斯坦頓解釋道，從狼和狗的進化來看，道格生活的時期是一個非常有趣的時期。

“We don’t know exactly when dogs were domesticated, but it may have been from about that time,” he adds. “We are interested in whether it is, in fact, a dog or a wolf, or perhaps it’s something halfway between the two.”

“我們不知道狗是什么時候被馴化的，但可能是從那個時候開始的，”他補充道。“我們感興趣的是它到底是狗還是狼，或者是介于兩者之間。”

Today’s pet pooch is thought to have been tamed from wolf breeds, though scientists can’t exactly pinpoint when that genetic branching took place. A 2017 study in the journal Nature Communications asserts that modern dogs were domesticated from a specific group of wolves who lived 20,000 to 40,000 years ago.

今天的寵物狗被認為是從狼的品種馴化而來，盡管科學家們不能準確地確定這種基因分支發(fā)生的時間。《自然通訊》(Nature Communications)雜志2017年發(fā)表的一項研究稱，現(xiàn)代狗是由生活在2萬至4萬年前的一群狼馴化而來的。

However, a study published in the journal Science the previous year found that dogs descended from two populations of gray wolves during the Paleolithic period, in both Asia and Europe.

然而，前一年發(fā)表在《科學》(Science)雜志上的一項研究發(fā)現(xiàn)，狗是舊石器時代亞洲和歐洲兩個灰狼種群的后代。