26-11-03 15:19, Daniel J. Milton wrote:
> In replies, Piotr and I believe Glen or others have argued
> against Torsten's linguistics, but repeated without comment his "out
> of SE Asia." A far as I know, recent genetic studies indicate that
> the dog is a domesticated descendant of the grey wolf and that dogs
> of East Asia (mainly China) show the greatest chromosomal diversity,
> suggesting (but not proving) that the locus of origin was in that
> area.
> Is there any evidence for a specifically SE Asian origin, or is
> that just a byproduct of Torsten's Sundaland fancies?
> Dan
The full version of the article (Savolainen et al. 2002):
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/298/5598/1610
In a nutshell, the authors argue that according to their most probable
scenario the ancestors of modern dogs were domesticated in East Asia
(including regions such as Tibet, India, China, Japan, Korea and
Thailand) about 15,000 years BP. Since domestic dogs appear in the
archaeological record of Europe, Southwest Asia and North America at at
the beginning of the Holocene or earlier (actually earlier than in East
Asia itself, which only goes to show how incomplete the record must be),
one can only conclude that the spread of domestic dogs took place almost
immediately upon their domestication (at any rate, in Palaeolithic
times, long before Proto-Austronesian).
Piotr