Old wild wolves: ancient DNA survey unveils population dynamics in Late Pleistocene and Holocene Italian remains.

ABSTRACT:

Background

The contemporary Italian wolf (Canis lupus italicus) represents a case of morphological and genetic uniqueness. Today, Italian wolves are also the only documented population to fall exclusively within the mitochondrial haplogroup 2, which was the most diffused across Eurasian and North American wolves during the Late Pleistocene. However, the dynamics leading to such distinctiveness are still debated.

Methods

In order to shed light on the ancient genetic variability of this wolf population and on the origin of its current diversity, we collected 19 Late Pleistocene-Holocene samples from northern Italy, which we analyzed at a short portion of the hypervariable region 1 of the mitochondrial DNA, highly informative for wolf and dog phylogenetic analyses.

Re

SUBMITTER: Ciucani MM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6441319 | biostudies-literature | 2019

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature