The emergence and diversification of dog morphology
Abstract
Dogs exhibit an exceptional range of morphological diversity as a result of their long-term association with humans. Attempts to identify when dog morphological variation began to expand have been constrained by the limited number of Pleistocene specimens, the fragmentary nature of remains, and difficulties in distinguishing early dogs from wolves on the basis of skeletal morphology. In this study, we used three-dimensional geometric morphometrics to analyze the size and shape of 643 canid crania spanning the past 50,000 years. Our analyses show that a distinctive dog morphology first appeared at about 11,000 calibrated years before present, and substantial phenotypic diversity already existed in early Holocene dogs. Thus, this variation emerged many millennia before the intense human-mediated selection shaping modern dog breeds beginning in the 19th century.
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Cite
@article{arxiv.2512.07413,
title = {The emergence and diversification of dog morphology},
author = {Allowen Evin and Carly Ameen and Colline Brassard and Sophie Dennis and Ekaterina E Antipina and Vincent Bonhomme and Myriam Boudadi-Maligne and Kate Britton and Francisco Gil Cano and Ruth F Carden and Julien Claude and Lídia Colominas and Stefan Curth and Sergey Egorovich Fedorov and Joan Frances and Daniela C Kalthoff and Andrew C Kitchener and Rick Knecht and Pavel Kosintsev and Anna Linderholm and Robert Losey and Ilia Merts and Viktor Merts and Maria Mostadius and Mark Omura and Vedat Onar and Alan K Outram and Joris Peters and André Rehazek and Erika Rosengren and Mikhail Sablin and Paul Sciulli and Maria Seguí and Z. Jack Tseng and Emma Usmanova and Victor Varfolomeev and Susan Crockford and Yaroslav Kuzmin and Laurent Frantz and Keith Dobney and Greger Larson},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.07413},
year = {2025}
}