The grey wolf (Canis lupus) was the first species to give rise to a domestic population, and they remained widespread throughout the last Ice Age when many other large mammal species went extinct. Little is known, however, about the history and possible extinction of past wolf populations or when and where the wolf progenitors of the present-day dog lineage (Canis familiaris) lived^{1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8}. Here we analysed 72 ancient wolf genomes spanning the last 100,000 years from Europe, Siberia and North America. We found that wolf populations were highly connected throughout the Late Pleistocene, with levels of differentiation an order of magnitude lower than they are today. This population connectivity allowed us to detect natural selection across the time series, including rapid fixation of mutations in the gene IFT88 40,000–30,000 years ago. We show that dogs are overall more closely related to ancient wolves from eastern Eurasia than to those from western Eurasia, suggesting a domestication process in the east. However, we also found that dogs in the Near East and Africa derive up to half of their ancestry from a distinct population related to modern southwest Eurasian wolves, reflecting either an independent domestication process or admixture from local wolves. None of the analysed ancient wolf genomes is a direct match for either of these dog ancestries, meaning that the exact progenitor populations remain to be located.

灰狼 ( Canis lupus ) 是第一个产生家养种群的物种，在上一个冰河时代许多其他大型哺乳动物物种灭绝时，它们仍然广泛分布。然而，关于过去狼群的历史和可能灭绝的情况，或者现代犬类 ( Canis familiaris ) 的狼祖先生活在何时何地，人们知之甚少^{1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8}. 在这里，我们分析了过去 10 万年来来自欧洲、西伯利亚和北美的 72 个古狼基因组。我们发现，在整个更新世晚期，狼种群高度相关，分化水平比今天低一个数量级。这种种群连通性使我们能够检测整个时间序列的自然选择，包括IFT88基因突变的快速固定40,000-30,000 年前。我们表明，狗与欧亚大陆东部的古代狼的关系总体上比欧亚大陆西部的古代狼更密切，这表明东方有一个驯化过程。然而，我们还发现，近东和非洲的狗有一半的祖先来自与现代西南欧亚狼相关的独特种群，这反映了独立的驯化过程或与当地狼的混合。所分析的古狼基因组中没有一个与这些狗的血统直接匹配，这意味着确切的祖先种群仍有待定位。