The shadow of the Ice Age

As ancient DNA becomes a more standard part of archaeological science it’s going really yield up some doozies. You’ve probably read Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past, and how it’s upended old paradigms. But with the human past we probably have a better idea of the range of possibilities. When it comes to other organisms it’s going to be a weirder and wilder ride I predict.

This is why a new preliminary result does not shock me, Ancient Japanese wolf may be rare remnant of ice age wolves:

The wolf’s DNA more closely resembled that of a long-extinct wolf that lived in Siberia more than 35,000 years ago than that of living Eurasian and American wolves, Niemann reported here on Friday at the International Symposium on Biomolecular Archaeology. Most ancient wolves went extinct when the ice sheets that covered the Northern Hemisphere began to melt more than 20,000 years ago and the large mammals the wolves hunted, such as mammoth, died off. But some of their DNA lived on in the Honshū wolf, which could offer a new window on the evolution of wolves as well as dogs, says paleogeneticist Mikkel Sinding of the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources in Nuuk, who extracted the DNA.

Unfortunately the last Honshu wolves were killed more than a century ago. But for the purposes of DNA extract that’s basically yesterday.

From everything I can see the “megafauna” that inhabit the Palearctic ecozone seem to have through a lot of mass extinctions over the last 50,000 years. This extends from Neanderthals, to mammoths, to large canids and felids. Some lineages, such as that of humans and wolves, also underwent expansions from the remaining branches of the phylogenetic tree. But it’s reasonable that various relic groups of earlier diversifications might persist here and there.