The 161 Names of Dog

The most detailed genomic analysis of dog breeds to date has been published in Cell Reports:

There are nearly 400 modern domestic dog breeds with a unique histories and genetic profiles. To track the genetic signatures of breed development, we have assembled the most diverse dataset of dog breeds, reflecting their extensive phenotypic variation and heritage. Combining genetic distance, migration, and genome-wide haplotype sharing analyses, we uncover geographic patterns of development and independent origins of common traits. Our analyses reveal the hybrid history of breeds and elucidate the effects of immigration, revealing for the first time a suggestion of New World dog within some modern breeds. Finally, we used cladistics and haplotype sharing to show that some common traits have arisen more than once in the history of the dog. These analyses characterize the complexities of breed development, resolving longstanding questions regarding individual breed origination, the effect of migration on geographically distinct breeds, and, by inference, transfer of trait and disease alleles among dog breeds.

The infographic above depicts the study’s findings. There are a number of things I found interesting about them.

First, the “primitive” dog breeds, e.g. basenjis, Alaskan malemutes, chow chows, etc., are all closely related. That’s what I would have expected. My own breed, the Samoyed, is slightly more distantly related to those ancestral breeds but closely related, for example, to the Eurasier. That’s completely unsurprising since Samoyeds were reportedly part of the breeding program that created the Eurasier.

Second, it answers some questions I’ve been curious about for some time. The cording trait, present in breeds like the poodle and the komondor, has apparently occurred multiple times. Also, while the various breeds of similar looking white herding and cattle dogs, e.g. kuvasz, Anatolian shepherd, and Great Pyrenees, are related, they’re equally related to various breeds of coursing dogs, e.g. saluki, Afghan hound. My Samoyeds are only distantly related to them which I guess is an illustration of form following function.

Although you are frequently told that the mastiff-type dogs are derived ultimately from the Tibetan mastiff, the relationship between the Asian dogs and the European mastiff-type dogs does not appear to be particularly close.