Where do dogs come from?

Why, from China of course! Not because of China's current manufacturing hegemony (they love that word), 霸權 in Chinese) but because that's where people apparently first tamed the wolf.

It was previously known that the birthplace of the dog was eastern Asia but historians were not able to be more precise than that.

However, now researchers have made a number of new discoveries about the history of man's best friend - including that the dog appeared about 16,000 years ago south of the Yangtze river in China.

It has also been discovered that even though the dog has a single geographical origin it descends from a "large number of animals - at least several hundred tamed wolves, probable even more"...

Peter Savolainen, a biology researcher at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm and who led the study with a team of Chinese researches, said: "For the first time in world history it is possible to provide a detailed picture of the dog, with its birthplace, point in time, and how many wolves were tamed.

"This is a considerably more specific date and birthplace than had previously been put forward.

"Our earlier findings from 2002 have not been fully accepted, but with our new data there will be greater acceptance.

"The picture provides much more detail."

One has to wonder at the circumstances that resulted in the conversion of one pack of wolves to domestic dogs.