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Comment by libraryofbabel | Hacker News Reader

> It is one of the few breeds with clear genetic links back to Arctic wolf populations, which is why it sits closer to the early proto-dog split than nearly all modern breeds.

What does this mean? Aren’t there just as many generations between a Siberian Husky and the wolf-dog split as between a pug and the wolf-dog split? Unless you’re saying there was interbreeding with wolves in the husky’s ancestry (but not the pug’s) after the initial split?

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Yes, all breeds are the same distance from the original dog/wolf split, but Huskies (northern snow dogs) are different because their lineage picked up extra genes from ancient Arctic wolves like the 35k-year-old Taimyr wolf. They also show direct continuity with ~9000 year old sled dogs from Zhokhov Island, while most modern breeds only go back a few hundred years. Add in thousands of years of breeding in isolation for Arctic work, and the functional traits that were developed over that long timespan left Huskies with more distinct genes than most other breeds.

That would be interesting, because the modern thinking goes that modern wolves are as different from wolves around the time of the wolf-dog split as modern dogs are. So if there was recent wolf interbreeding in the husky lineage, it's a different kind of wolf than what the first dogs were descended from. They're all very similar animals, so it may only show up on DNA tests, but there may be a sort of genetic timestamp showing when the last wolf admixture was that's visible on a DNA test.

I have doubts that changes in selection pressure on wolves in their natural environment, no matter how many generations, is remotely close to domestication and selective breeding.

The thousands of years of selection in the Arctic shaped Huskies, not the old wolf/husky interbreeding, which only left small but distinct genetic markers. Those came from an ancient Arctic wolf that split off around the same time as the ancestors of dogs and modern wolves, which is why they still show up so clearly today.

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