Dogs Likely Originated In Asia 15,000 Years Ago

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http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/20/scien ... .html?_r=0

15,000 years, and still man's best friend.

Absolutely.

Ironically, my mom enjoys "babying" the family dog, then treating the dog like a piece of crap.

Your mom is a microcosm of the human race at large- which both pampers, and persecutes dogs. 75 percent of dogs alive today are "pariah dogs" that roam the streets of India, or other places, scavenging. Wild dingos in Australia seemed to be related to that group.

The study was quite comprehensive- focused on nuclear DNA (coed), mitochondria DNA (female line only), and Y chromosome DNA (male line only). And covered a huge range of dog breeds and types from around the world. Would like to have seen more precolumbian New World dogs mentioned (Chihuahua, and wild Carolina dogs-aka 'American dingos'), and would have been nice to see DNA from fossil dogs included if any has been sequenced.

But still it looks like a good data base.

Dogs still seemed to be the oldest domesticated species, predating both plant crops, and farm animals, and predating the house cat (which still hasnt really been domesticated).

Of course. Dogs can be used to hunt in hunting societies. That, or they can be a ready source of food.

Hate to nitpick, but I think most evidence shows that that happened about 33,000 years ago, not 15,000. That's when dogs involved from wolves.

Ancient Wolf DNA Could Solve Dog Origin Mystery

I hate to nitpick, but dogs "evolved from wolves", not "involved from wolves".

And I hate to nitpick, but the fact is that no one knows what the fact is about the date when dogs were first domesticated.

The article in the OP shows that the evidence can solidly place it only to about 15 to 18 thousand years ago. It doesnt rule out that it could have been earlier. But evidence for it being earlier is not as solid. The site from which the article was taken also has an article about the Taymyr wolf. Articles on both that site, and on the site your citing (articles on related subjects) all give lines of evidence pointing to dates that range from 11000 years to 35 thousand years ago for the dog/wolf split. Its a tangled knot of a problem to solve (partially because dogs have interbred with wild wolves and coyotes after domestication to complicate their genome).

My guess is that it was earlier rather than later that some species of wolf started to hangout with human hunter gatherers somewhere in Ice Age Eurasia. The main stream of dog ancestry may have come from an unidentified now extinct species of wolf that no longer lives in the wild, and apparently there was an added infusion of genes from the Taymyr wolf (also now extinct) of coastal Ice Age Siberia that gave rise to the Eskimo sled dog breeds.