Ancient DNA analyses clarify population dynamics between the Late Pleistocene and Bronze Age Italian canids and the possible contribution to local dog domestication

In the last decades, paleogenetic methodologies have greatly improved, permitting to study ancient specimens through the analysis of their whole mitochondrial and nuclear genomes. This approach makes it possible to investigate very ancient evolutionary processes, even older than 1 million years ago, and better comprehend the evolutionary patterns of modern species and their relationships with ancestors. In Europe, especially in southern areas corresponding to the historical glacial refugia during the Last Glacial Maximum, only a few data about the genetic diversity of grey wolves (Canis lupus) prior to their domestication and of early dogs (Canis lupus familiaris) are currently available. Such ancient DNA data are even rarer and more fragmented for the Italian wolves (Canis lupus italicus), which represent the only modern population to fall exclusively within the mitochondrial haplogroup diffused across Eurasian and North American wolves during the Late Pleistocene. Therefore, to fill the gap of such information, in this study, performed within the project “FIDO - Following Dog Domestication Origin and dynamics from Late Pleistocene in Italy”, we applied the cutting-edge methodologies for the analysis of ancient DNA. We sequenced 30 ancient wolf and early dog complete mitogenomes with an outstanding coverage range from 22X to 946X, from biological remains collected in northern Italian archaeological sites, dated from 42.000 to 3.000 years BP. These mitogenomes were compared to ancient and modern wolf and dog sequences available in the literature to perform phylogenetic analyses. Results provided an overview of the temporal patterns of the Italian wolf genetic variability, clarifying population dynamics that started in the Late Pleistocene and contributed to the current morphological and genetic uniqueness of the Italian population. Furthermore, thanks to these results, the possible role of ancient Italian wolves in local dog domestication dynamics, was investigated.