Small Dogs Originated In The Middle East

In my chapter THE APE THAT DOMESTICATED ITSELF I go into some detail about proposed routes to the domestication of dogs. The most popular theory at the moment is that dogs began the process of their own domestication through selection for the tolerance of the proximity of man while scrounging around early human encampments and villages. But the big question mark hangs over precisely which species of wolf was the progenitor. Some researchers claim it was the gray wolf while others, claiming the gray wolf was too big, have elected for a smaller Asian wolf, or several progenitors rather the same size as present day jackals, in order to accommodate the decrease in size for most dogs compared with wolves. Now Robert Wayne and Melissa Gray, two prominent genetics researchers in this area, have come up with a proposal that the gray wolf was indeed the ancestor but that the preliminary evolutionary processes of domestication favoured the selection of a gene, IGF1, which is a determinant of small size.