American Dogs Have Asian Roots

Some people's national pride might take a hit from this piece of news, but the fact remains that American dogs have Asian roots.

Or at least this is what a study recently published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B argues.

By the looks of it, hundreds of dog breeds presently thriving in the Americas sport Asian DNA.

Granted, some of their genes (30%, to be more precise) can be traced back to Europe, yet most of them have an Asian origin.

Live Science explains that these findings suggest that, contrary to common held assumptions, the European colonizers that arrived in the Americas decimated the indigenous human communities, but not their dogs.

On the contrary, the dogs got the chance to mate with European breeds, and eventually spawned most of the breeds that can be found across the entire territory of the Americas.