Ancient Dog Dna Unveils 11,000 Years of Canine Evolution

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News in focus the world, so the origin of dogs must have been substantially earlier than that,” says Skoglund. ANCIENT DOG DNA With so many genomes, the researchers could follow ancient canine populations as UNVEILS 11,000 YEARS OF they moved and mixed, and compare these shifts with those in human populations. CANINE EVOLUTION Sometimes, the dogs’ travels paralleled people’s. When Middle Eastern farmers started Genomes trace how the animals moved around the expanding into Europe 10,000 years ago, they took dogs with them, and the animals — like world — often with humans by their side. their owners — mixed with local populations. Ancient Middle Eastern dogs that lived around By Ewen Callaway 7,000 years ago are linked to modern dogs in sub-Saharan Africa, which could be connected uman history is for the dogs. The to ‘back to Africa’ human movements around largest-ever study of ancient genomes that time. from the canines suggests that where But the histories of humans and dogs hav- people went, so did their four-legged en’t always overlapped. A major influx of friends — to a point. The research also people from the steppes of Russia and Ukraine Hidentified major regional shifts in human 5,000 years ago led to lasting change in the ancestry that left little mark on dog popula- genetic make-up of Europe’s humans, but tions, as well as times when dogs changed, but not its dogs. The study also revealed that the their owners didn’t. ancestry of European dogs has become much The analysis of more than two dozen less varied in the past 4,000 years, a period Eurasian dogs also suggests the animals were when thorough sampling of ancient human

domesticated and became widespread around DNA has revealed less tumult. HEUCLIN/NPL DANIEL the world well before 11,000 years ago. But it A New Guinea singing dog. The cause of this disconnect is a mystery, does not make any claims as to when or where says Angela Perri, a zooarchaeologist at domestication from wolves happened, an lineage characterized by modern New Guinea Durham University, UK. “Was it a case of issue that has vexed researchers and sparked singing dogs (which are related to Australian the introduction of something like disease? sometimes heated debate. dingoes). “Already, 11,000 years ago, there Cultural preference?” she wonders. “These are “Dogs are a separate tracer dye for human were at least 5 different groups of dogs across likely cultural questions the DNA can’t answer.” history,” says Pontus Skoglund, a population geneticist at the Francis Crick Institute in London who co-led the study (A. Bergström et al. Science 370, 557–564; 2020). “Some- times human DNA might not show parts of WEALTHY FUNDER prehistory that we can see with dog genomes.” Until the past few years, canine genetic PAYS REPARATIONS history had been told largely through DNA from modern dogs. But this has offered a FOR USE OF STOLEN CELLS muddled picture, because much of early dogs’ genetic diversity was probably lost Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s six-figure donation when modern breeds were established. The first studies of ancient dog genomes hinted aims to compensate for research on HeLa cell line. at past changes in canine populations. But with just six ancient dog or wolf genomes By Alexandra Witze were not consulted on other medical deci- available until now, such conclusions have sions stemming from the use of the cells in been preliminary. major biomedical-research organ- research. ization has for the first time aimed “We felt it was right to acknowledge Pedigree chums to make financial reparation for the Henrietta for the use of HeLa cells and to To expand the pool of ancient dog DNA, continuing experimental use of cells acknowledge that the cells were gained in Skoglund’s lab joined groups led by Greger from Henrietta Lacks, a Black woman appropriately,” says Erin O’Shea, president of Larson, an evolutionary geneticist at the Awho was the source of the historic ‘HeLa’ cell the HHMI. “And to acknowledge that we have University of Oxford, UK, and archaeologist line, which has been a mainstay of biological a long way to go before science and medi- Ron Pinhasi at the University of Vienna. The research for decades. The Henrietta Lacks cine are really equitable.” The HHMI did not teams sequenced 27 ancient dog genomes Foundation announced the six-figure gift from disclose the exact amount of the donation. “I from Europe, the Middle East and Siberia, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) can’t speak for everybody, but I know some ranging from 11,000 to 100 years old. in Chevy Chase, Maryland, on 29 October. family members are grateful for this gift,” says By modelling the relationships in and In 1951, doctors took cancerous cells from Jeri Lacks-Whye, a granddaughter of Lacks. between groups of ancient and modern Lacks without her consent, and later created “Hopefully, other institutions will follow suit.” dogs, the researchers determined that a the HeLa cell line, which today supports a The HHMI decided to make the donation 10,900-year-old dog from Russia was distinct multibillion-dollar biotechnology industry. after this year’s transformative protests over from later ancient European, Middle Eastern, Lacks died soon afterwards, and, for decades, racial injustice in the United States, including Siberian or American dogs, as well as a canine her family saw no financial compensation and the killing of George Floyd, an unarmed Black

man, by police in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in May. The institution’s high profile as one of Q&A the world’s biggest private funders of basic biomedical research could set a precedent for other research organizations to take similar steps towards reckoning with racial injustice in the sciences, and making reparation for exper- The data scientist iments conducted unethically on people from keeping tabs on bots communities of colour. The donation is “absolutely thrilling — it’s and the US election

from an institution that’s well recognized and EMILIO FERRARA has a lot of power and a lot of sway”, says Donté Social-media platforms such as Twitter What worries you most about bots today? Alexander Stevens, a cell biologist and grad- were used to sow discord in the United In 2016, I was worried that no one was paying uate student at the University of California, States in the run-up to the 2016 presidential attention to social-media manipulation. San Diego (UCSD). election, according to a report finalized this Today, the situation is different: there are Stevens and his colleagues working in year by the US Senate. Russian operatives millions of eyes on this. Governments and the laboratory of UCSD biologist Samara manipulated tools such as bots — companies are involved in monitoring social- Reck-Peterson had discussed ways of address- automated accounts that share content — media platforms. My biggest concern now ing systemic racism in science earlier this year. in an attempt to deceive social-media users is, what are we doing with these platforms? After many conversations, including with in the United States and sway the election Are we okay with them being incubators of members of the Lacks family, they settled on in favour of President Donald Trump, the misinformation? Do we want to have some donating to the Henrietta Lacks Foundation report found (see go.nature.com/38b0dlk). regulations on them, and where should the every time their lab created a new HeLa cell Ahead of the 2020 election, researchers regulations come from? line, as well as for those created in the past. were more worried than ever about Reck-Peterson is an HHMI investigator, and interference from bots. The fake accounts Earlier this year, your team analysed more her lab’s action triggered the HHMI’s leader- have become harder to detect, says Emilio than 240 million tweets related to the 2020 ship to consider making its own donation, Ferrara (pictured), a data scientist at the election. Tell us about your findings. says O’Shea. University of Southern California in Los Human accounts usually outnumber bots. Angeles who studies social-media bots to But around certain political events [such Righting wrongs understand how they can change people’s as the national conventions of the US The HeLa story became widely known with the beliefs and behaviours. He spoke to Nature Democratic and Republican parties], we 2010 publication of the book The Immortal about his team’s findings. observed that the amount of bot activity Life of Henrietta Lacks. But until recently, no dwarfed human activity (E. Ferrara et al. institutions had stepped forward to make You have analysed billions of tweets in the First Monday https://doi.org/fgkf; 2020). restitution for using the cells, says the book’s past few years. Have bots changed over We also found an enormous amount of bot author, Rebecca Skloot. In August — the month that time? activity associated with conspiracy theories in which Lacks would have turned 100 — the UK Back in 2016, bots used simple strategies such as QAnon and the one depicting biotech firm Abcam in Cambridge announced that were easy to detect. But today, there are COVID-19 as a liberal scam. About one in that it had made an unspecified donation to artificial intelligence (AI) tools that produce four accounts that use QAnon hashtags and the foundation. And individuals have made pri- human-like language. We are not able to retweet [far-right outlets] Infowars and One vate donations. For instance, Francis Collins, detect bots that use AI, because we can’t America News Network are bots. [QAnon is a the director of the US National Institutes of distinguish them from human accounts. baseless far-right conspiracy theory alleging Health, is giving an unspecified amount of his These bots survive longer on social-media that a group of paedophiles is running a 2020 Templeton Prize, worth US$1.4 million, platforms and can create botnets, which global child sex-trafficking ring and plotting to the foundation. are networks of bots that push the same against Trump.] The HHMI gift, though, is the largest yet, messages. To detect botnets, we have says Skloot, the foundation’s president and developed methods to identify accounts that Does your research show interference from founder. “The more of this that we do — seem to be synchronized. countries such as Russia in this election? whether through the foundation or other Using data on accounts banned from things — the closer we’re going to get to How effective are bots at spreading Twitter, we found that interference being able to fix some of the wrongs that have disinformation? operations from China and Russia are happened,” she says. In 2016, people retweeted content targeting both right-leaning and left- The foundation gives grants to people who originated by bots at almost the same rate at leaning users, whereas operations from have unknowingly been part of historic med- which they retweeted content originated by other countries, such as Ghana and ical-research studies, and to their families human accounts. Today, the number of users Nigeria, mostly interact with left-leaning who did not benefit from that work. Recent retweeting bots has greatly diminished. users. Some researchers think that foreign grants have included educational and medical One explanation is that companies such as actors tend to inject themselves into fringe expenses for members of the Lacks family, as Twitter have got better at detecting bots communities. But, at least from our analysis, well as support for the families of the Black and suspending them. Another explanation it turns out that they target mainstream men who, from 1932 to 1972, were part of a US is that people have got better at spotting conservatives or liberals. government experiment to observe the effects content originated by bots. But another of untreated syphilis. The men thought they possibility is that we can’t identify the more Interview by Giorgia Guglielmi were receiving free health care, but doctors sophisticated bots, so we can’t detect when This interview has been edited for length and gave them placebos and administered sham they are retweeted by human users. clarity. procedures instead.