Happy Nice Mall

“Little Malta” The American Kennel Club tells us“Since the Bible has been a study in progress, it has been sitting in the lap of luxury.”

This is also the opinion of my Maltese owner friend (the dog is also my friend), who recently saw the Greeks and Romans as early fans of the breed.

I occasionally have these conversations with people who belong to one genre or another, and I usually shake my head and say maybe, sort of. True, Aristotle praised the proportions of a type of lap dog described as a Melita dog. Scientists debate whether this means the dog came from Malta, or from another island called Melite or Miljet, or from a town in Sicily. It was a long time ago, after all. Aristotle also compared the dog to a marten, a member of the marten family, perhaps because of its size. And yes, the Romans absolutely loved these dogs.

So there is little doubt that there were little white lap dogs 2,000 years ago. The question is whether the modern Maltese breed comes directly from domestic animals that the Romans scratched behind their ears.

I didn’t mention this to the dog, who prefers to remain anonymous because the internet can be malicious. And I doubt he’ll pay much attention to genealogical intrigues. As far as I can see, their interests are more directed towards treats, arrogant and irresistible squirrels, and places that roam around and smell.

It’s not just Maltese enthusiasts who are interested in the ancient roots of their breed. Basenjis, Pomeranians, Samoyeds, Salukis, terriers and others have their supporters who want to trace the breed back to ancient times. But the Maltese seemed like a good dog to argue because the historical record is so rich. It is clear that the Maltese is an ancient breed. True?

I brought this question to several scientists I consulted when I had canine DNA questions. Is the modern Maltese breed actually ancient? You’ll be shocked to find out, the scientists said, no. However, as with anything involving dogs and science, it is complex.

A few points to set the scene. Just as all humans can trace their ancestry back to the first Homo sapiens, all dogs are descendants of the first dogs. None of us or our dogs have an older ancestor than the other. What people want to know is whether these ancestors were idiots or nobles, William the Conqueror or one of the conquered, a dog riding a portrait in his lap, or a dog getting into trouble on the street.

By the way, I’m not looking at this from the outside. I’ve been there too, digging as deep as I can into the long and honorable history of my cairn terriers and Pomeranians. I also tried to trace my family’s O’Connors and O’Leary’s and Fallons and Goritzes. (I haven’t met a conqueror yet.) But the idea of ​​valuing genetic purity can sometimes sound daunting, even to animals that like to roll cow pies whenever they can.

Elaine Ostrander, a dog genomics expert at the National Institutes of Health, went deep into breed differences and history like any scientist. He said the hunger for older lineage ancestors was similar to the desire for human ancestors to return to the Mayflower. “This is how we think about ourselves. This is how we think about our dogs.”

“It was the Pharaoh hound people who first approached me and asked this question,” he recalled.

“Do our dogs really date back to Pharaonic times?” The breeders asked. Unfortunately not. Dr. Ostrander, II of this genus. He said it was “completely recreated by mixing and matching existing breeds” after World War II.

Other breeds were established in the Victorian era by selecting an existing group of dogs and classifying them as a breed with a definition meaning that only dogs whose names are in a registry or whose ancestors can be identified in that registry are suitable for the breed. And 2,000 years ago, “there was no concept of breed,” he said.

Nor does DNA show a direct line from ancient to modern Maltese. It’s worth taking a step back to understand what canine DNA research is all about. Dr. The genetic markers that Ostrander and other researchers use in genome comparisons to identify breeds are often not genes that contain floppy ears or bent legs or a particular color coat.

They are looking for a way to see how close one is to the other, not a genetic recipe for a Bassett Hound or Beagle. Most DNA in humans and dogs has no known function. Only part of a genome makes up true genetics. And, if any, repetitive stretches of DNA of unknown purpose have proven useful in comparing groups and individuals. They change more from generation to generation and therefore offer more diversity for scientists to work with when comparing breeds. What the researchers developed is a kind of fingerprint, but not a blueprint.

What Dr. Neither Ostrander nor Heidi Parker, a colleague and collaborator at the NIH, gave a definitive answer on how far back a genre can be traced, but they agreed that it basically depends on how long a genre club has been keeping records. in a dog’s DNA. Before then, breeding was not so regulated.

Dr. The Maltese, havanese, bichon, and Bolognese (dog, not sauce) genomes are all related, Parker said. Races may have split from a common ancestor several hundred years ago, and that common ancestor may no longer exist or may be closer to one of the races than the others. But there is no DNA line that can be traced back to Aristotle’s time.

When I asked Greger Larson of the University of Oxford, who studies the ancient and modern DNA of dogs and other animals, if any breeds belong to antiquity, he seemed like I was asking him, as far as I could tell from the Zoom image. The world can really be flat.

“The breeds have closed breeding lines,” he said. “That’s the idea. Once they’re in place, you’re not allowed to bring anything in. And the concept of breeding towards aesthetics and closing the breeding line – all this is just the mid-19th century UK”

“I don’t care if you’re talking about a boxer, a singing dog in New Guinea, or a basenji,” he said. Races, by definition, are new.

However, for a long, long time there have been breeds of dogs bred to chase, cuddle or herd sheep. Dr. One such breed, called the Maltese neighbor, can be described as “really small dogs with short legs and they require a lot of attention and people fall in love with them,” Larson said. This lineage certainly existed in ancient Rome.

My friend Maltese partisan sent me pictures of old paintings. Mary Queen of Scots has one of a kind little dog in a portrait around 1580, but I must say it looks more like a Papillon ghost than a living Maltese. Queen Elizabeth also has a small dog that looks like a small white dog in a portrait from the same time.

There are others but I doubt they will qualify for the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show. And none of this means that the modern Maltese or any other modern breed is the same as the dogs of antiquity.

Dr. “We want to say that our dog is very old in his current state, he hasn’t changed,” Larson said. “Like Maltese has been Maltese for the last 2000 years. And that is clearly not true. Although “not right” was not the word he used.

“People haven’t been breeding dogs the way we do for a long time,” he said. “What’s missing from our vocabulary is a word for dogs that mostly look the same, do the same job.”

But putting the words aside, I asked what about the DNA. Does DNA tell us how close a Maltese-like dog now was to the Maltese back then? He said that in the past dog breeding was never done by physical type, dogs moved as people moved from Rome to England and back to Spain and Rome, and no one followed pedigrees. Also, breeds were determined based on the limited number of dogs that were accepted into the breed at that time. This is known as an extreme bottleneck in genetics. And all modern dogs are descended from only a few, unless crossbreeding and mixing to change the appearance of the breed.

Now you can find out if your Maltese is truly a Maltese by looking at his pedigree or, if you want to research his genome, by sending some slobber (dog) to a company like Embark, with over 100 employees chasing secrets. Dog DNA as part of the Darwin’s Ark project at the University of Massachusetts, or an academic initiative like Darwin’s Dogs. (Ark, no judgment here, includes cats.) The scientists involved in this study are also drawn into the breed issue in antiquity by curious dog owners and journalists.

Adam Boyko, Embark’s co-founder and a geneticist at Cornell University’s School of Veterinary Medicine, agreed that modern breeds with “closed populations” are about 200 years old.

“There is no doubt that little white lap dogs have a long history,” he said. “They were very popular in Roman times. They may or may not have come from Malta or another Greek island.” But what sort of genetic continuity might exist in modern small white lap dogs is an open question, he said.

Even in human genealogy, where the human equivalent of a pedigree can be traced back 1000 years, the idea of ​​genetic continuity is separate from the reality of genes.

Over the ages, each time a male and female produce offspring, they receive half of the DNA from each parent. The genetic deck is shuffled and half of the cards are discarded. This confusion happens over and over again. In each generation, it is as if two 52-card decks are shuffled, resulting in a new deck still numbered 52.

“When you go back 10 generations,” Dr. Boyko, most of those ancestors didn’t actually contribute any DNA to you 10 generations ago. It’s mixed in the middle.” Same as the Maltese. Even if there was a documented direct line, which it doesn’t, the descendants wouldn’t have much of the specific genetic diversity of the ancestors.

Ultimately, of course, we can’t be completely clear on dog breeds, because “breed” is used by different people to mean different things, said Elinor Karlsson, a genomics researcher at the University of Massachusetts Medical School who runs Darwin’s Ark.

Speaking of dogs in art, he said: “The dog in the picture may just look like a Maltese and may be completely unrelated to Maltese today. This dog may have exactly the same genetic variant that causes Maltese to be small or Maltese to be white.” However, “I don’t know if that makes them the same breed. It’s kind of a cultural concept.”

“So does that mean your Maltese is old because he’s an old Maltese with the same mutation? I mean, it kind of depends on your perspective,” said Dr. Karlsson.