How Much does a Maltese Dog Breed Have?
“The little Maltese,” let us know the American Kennel Club, “He has been sitting in the lap of luxury since the Bible was a work in progress.”
This is also the opinion of my friend the Maltese owner (the dog is also my friend), who recently invoked the Greeks and Romans as early admirers of the breed.
Sometimes I have these conversations with people who are dedicated to one race or another and I usually feel and say, well, maybe, something. True, Aristotle praised the proportions of a type of abdominal dog described as a Melitaean dog. Scholars debate whether this means the dog came from Malta, or another island called Melite or Miljet, or perhaps a town in Sicily. It was a long time ago, after all. Aristotle also compared the dog to a marten, a member of the weasel family, perhaps because of its size. And yes, the Romans absolutely loved these dogs.
So there is little doubt that there were a few white lap dogs 2,000 years ago. The question is whether the modern Maltese breed is directly descended from the pets that the Romans brought out behind the ears.
I did not mention this to the dog himself, who prefers to remain anonymous because the internet can be bad. And I doubt she pays much attention to genealogical intrigue. Her interests, from what I can see, move more towards treaties, arrogant and intolerable chipmunks and smelly places where they turn.
It is not just Maltese amateurs who are interested in the ancient roots of their race. Basenjis, Pomeranians, Samoyeds, Salukis, terriers and others have supporters who want to trace the races back to ancient times. But the Maltese seemed a good dog to discuss because the historical record is very rich. Obviously the Maltese are an ancient race. So?
I brought up this question to many of the scientists I turn to when I have questions about dog DNA. Is the modern Maltese race, in fact, ancient? Scientists, be shocked when you learn, said no. But, like anything that involves dogs and science, it’s complicated.
A couple of points to put the stage. All dogs are descendants of the first dogs, just as all humans can trace their ancestors to the first Homo sapiens. None of us, or our dogs, have older ancestors than any other. What people seem to want to know is whether those ancestors were mutts or nobles, William the Conqueror or one of the conquered, a lap dog that came into a photo, or a street dog that got into trouble. .
I’m not looking at this from the outside, by the way. I was there myself, digging as deep as I could into the long and ladies history of my terriers and Pomeranians. I also tried to follow the O’Connors and O’Learys and the Fallons and Goritzes of my family. (I haven’t found a winner yet.) But the idea of assessing genetic purity sometimes feels like a drag, even if it’s in animals that like to turn in cow pies when they get a chance.
Elaine Ostrander, a specialist in dog genomics at the National Institutes of Health, has gone deep into the differences in breed and history like any scientist. She said the hunger for the ancestors of an ancient race is similar to the desire to reach back to the Mayflower for human precedents. “It simply came to our notice then. So we think so about our dogs. “
“The people of the Pharaoh hound were the first to approach me and ask that question,” he recalled.
“Do our dogs really go back to Pharaoh’s time?” asked the breeders. Unfortunately not. That breed, Dr. Ostrander said, was “completely recreated by mixing and comparing existing breeds” after World War II.
Other breeds were established by selecting an existing group of dogs in the Victorian era and classifying them as a breed by definition which meant only dogs whose name was on a register or whose ancestors could be identified as being in that breed. register, which match the breed. And 2,000 years ago, she said, “the concept of race didn’t exist.”
Nor does DNA show any direct line from old to modern Maltese. To understand what dog DNA research is, it’s worth taking a step back. The genetic markers that Dr. Ostrander and other researchers use in comparing the genome to identify strains that are not largely the genes that contain the recipe for floppy ears or crooked legs or a certain color coating.
They are not looking for a genetic recipe for a Basset hound or a beagle, but a way to see how closely it is related to one another. Most DNA in humans and dogs has no known function. Only a portion of a genome forms actual genes. And repetitive bands of DNA of unknown purpose, if any, have been shown to be useful in comparing groups and individuals. They change more from generation to generation and therefore offer more variation for scientists to work with in comparing breeds. What the researchers develop is a race fingerprint, but not a plan.
Neither Dr. Ostrander nor Heidi Parker, a colleague and collaborator at NIH, gave a firm answer on how far back a race can be traced, but agreed that it basically depends on how long a race club has been keeping records, not on what is in it. -DNA of a dog. Prior to that time, breeding was not so regulated.
The genomes of Maltese, havanese, bichon and Bolognese (the dog is not the sauce) are all related, said Dr Parker. The races may have been divided by a common ancestor a few hundred years ago and that common ancestor may no longer exist, or may have been closer to one of the races than the others. But there is no DNA line to be traced back to the time of Aristotle.
When I asked Greger Larson, from Oxford University, who studies the ancient and modern DNA of dogs and other animals, whether any breeds are of antiquity, he appeared, as I could see from his Zoom image, as I asked if the Earth could be flat.
“Breeds have closed breeding lines,” he said. “It simply came to our notice then. Once they are set, you are not allowed to put anything in it. And that concept of breeding towards aesthetics and the closure of the breeding line – it’s all just the mid-19th century UK ”
He said. Breeds, by definition, are recent.
However, there was a breed of dog bred for running, or lap, or for grazing sheep, for a long, long time. One such line, called adjacent to the Maltese, can be defined as “very small dogs with short legs and need a lot of attention and people are in love with them,” said Dr Larson. That lineage was certainly around in ancient Rome.
My friend the Maltese partisan sent me pictures of old paintings. Mary Queen of Scots has some kind of small dog in a photo from around 1580, but I have to say it looks more like a Papillon ghost than a living Maltese. Queen Elizabeth also has a small dog in a photo from about the same time, which looks like a small white dog, roughly.
There are many others, but I doubt they qualify for the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show. And none of this means that modern Maltese or any other modern breed is the same as the dogs of antiquity.
“We have to say that our dog is very old in its current form, which has not changed,” Dr. Larson said. “Like the Maltese, they are Maltese for the last 2,000 years. And this is clearly “not true. Although” not true “was not the expression he used.
“People haven’t bred dogs in the way we do now for a long time,” he said. “What we don’t have in our vocabulary is a word for dogs that mostly look the same, do the same kind of work.”
But, setting aside the words, I asked, what about DNA. Does DNA tell us how close a dog to a Maltese is now to a Maltese then? He said that dog breeding in the past was never done with the physical type, that dogs moved as people moved, from Rome to Britain, and back to Spain and Rome, and that no one kept track of pedigrees. In addition, when the breeds were established, they were based on a limited number of dogs admitted to the breed at the time. This is known in genetics as extreme congestion. And all modern dogs are descended from only a few, unless there is mixing and mixing to change the appearance of the breed, which can happen.
Now you can find out if your Maltese is really Maltese by checking its breed or, if you want to dig into its genome, by sending a little saliva (of the dog) to a company like Embark, with more than 100 employees running following the secrets of dog DNA, or an academic venture like Darwin’s Dogs, part of the Darwin’s Ark project at the University of Massachusetts. (The ark, no judgment here, does not include cats.) The scientists involved in this work are also drawn to the question of the antiquity of the breed by curious dog owners and journalists.
Adam Boyko, the co-founder of Embark, and a geneticist at Cornell University’s School of Veterinary Medicine, agreed that modern breeds, with their “closed populations” are about 200 years old.
He said there is no doubt that small white lap dogs have a long history. “They were very popular in Roman times. They may or may not have come from Malta or another Greek island. “But he said, it’s an open question what kind of genetic continuity there can be with modern little white puppies.
Even in human genealogy, where one can trace the human equivalent of a 1,000-year-old race breed, the idea of genetic continuity is divorced from the reality of genes.
Over time, every time a man and a woman produce pups, they take half of the DNA from each parent. The genetic deck is shuffled and half of the papers are discarded. This mixing occurs more and more. In each generation, it is as if two decks of 52 cards are mixed to come up with a new deck that still counts 52.
“When you go back 10 generations,” said Dr. Boyko, many of those ancestors, 10 generations back actually didn’t contribute any DNA to you. She came out. “Same with Maltese. Even if there was a documented direct line, which does not exist, the descendants do not have much of the specific genetic variation of the ancestors.
In the end, of course, explained Elinor Karlsson, a genomics researcher at the University of Massachusetts Medical School who runs Darwin’s Ark, we can’t achieve complete clarity on dog breeds because “breed” is used. to mean different things to different people.
Speaking about dogs in art, she said: “It is possible that the dog in the painting simply looks like a Maltese and is completely unrelated to today’s Maltese. It is possible that that dog actually has exactly the same genetic variant that causes a Maltese to be young or that causes a Maltese to be white. “But,” she added, “I don’t know if that makes them the same race or not. That’s kind of a cultural concept. “
“So does this mean that your Maltese is old because there was an old Maltese who had that same mutation? That is, it depends on your perspective, ”Dr Karlsson said.