6 Page Article – 15th June 2019
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It’s widely believed that all dogs today trace their roots to a single group of wolves that crossed the path of humans almost 40,000 years ago. Researchers in this fascinating study believe that domestication happened from two separate wolf populations, one in Europe and the other in Asia.
Recent DNA analysis has shown that ancient dogs first split from wolves around 40,000 years ago, most likely caused by the presence of human camps. However, the latest understanding indicates that, rather than humans actively taming wild wolves, it would have started with the animals approaching hunter-gatherer camps in search of food.
As time went by, it is reckoned that integration of the wolf/dog human friendship was well established around 7000 years ago, dogs had pretty much evolved in comparison with today’s modern hound breed and were spreading everywhere, across the globe.
Modern Researchers have reached the opinion that the European dog of that period is most likely the one that went on to father many of the modern dog breeds found today. With careful assumptions, the findings relied upon fossilised DNA of two dogs dug up in Germany, 7000 and 4700 years old, which they compared to modern day hounds.
It was in 1955 that Karel Hartl began to consider crossing a Carpathian wolf with a German shepherd as a scientific experiment at the military kennels in Czechoslovakia.
A few years later, the idea was born and so too was the establishment of a new breed of hybrid.
The first hybrids of a female wolf named Brita and a male German shepherd named Cesar were born on 26 May 1958 in Libějovice.
So let’s fast forward into the 20th Century, the origin of the wolf, hybrid wolf and dog that has spread globally in many countries for various reasons.
The Czechoslovakian Wolfdog were eventually engineered as attack dogs for use in military special operations done by the Slovak special forces commandos, but were later also used in search and rescue, schutzhund, tracking, herding, agility, obedience, hunting and drafting in Europe and the United States.
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