Re:Humans are more closely related than we commonly think
by rsynnott on Tuesday October 06, 2020 @08:46AM
(#24697102)
> The genetic split between timber wolves and Chihuahuas was like 5,000 years ago and I bet they have common ancestors much more recently than that.
Well, for a start, this is completely wrong. Dogs diverged from wolves 20-40,000 years ago (lots of ambiguity over where exactly the divergence should be called), but from a now-extinct wolf species. While dogs and wolves _can_ interbreed, it doesn't happen naturally all that often (and when it does, it's pretty much all unidirectional; dog to wolf). Humans don't have the same issue.
A chihuahua, of course, is a result of deliberate and extreme forced breeding of a sort that (thankfully) has not really been practiced on humans. The closest parallel might be certain European royal families who had severe genetic diseases and abnormal physiology due to repeated inbreeding, but those were much, much less extreme. Dogs, though, were subject to fairly dramatic artificial selection from the start.
Well, for a start, this is completely wrong. Dogs diverged from wolves 20-40,000 years ago (lots of ambiguity over where exactly the divergence should be called), but from a now-extinct wolf species. While dogs and wolves _can_ interbreed, it doesn't happen naturally all that often (and when it does, it's pretty much all unidirectional; dog to wolf). Humans don't have the same issue.
A chihuahua, of course, is a result of deliberate and extreme forced breeding of a sort that (thankfully) has not really been practiced on humans. The closest parallel might be certain European royal families who had severe genetic diseases and abnormal physiology due to repeated inbreeding, but those were much, much less extreme. Dogs, though, were subject to fairly dramatic artificial selection from the start.