NEW YORK (AP) The long-debated question of where dogs first appeared has always been complex, and now a new study suggests it may have two answers.
Dogs arose from the domestication of wolves, and the new work suggests this happened twice, once in Asia and also in either Europe or the Near East.
"We were slightly surprised," since domestic animals usually have a single origin, said lead study author Laurent Frantz of Oxford University.
In a paper released Thursday by the journal Science, he and co-authors stressed that their conclusion is only a hypothesis, and that more work is needed to assess it.