Golden Jackals Evolution

Canidae, the dog family, consists of 34 related species that diverged within the last 10 million years (Toh 2005). When humans migrated out of Africa, they came in contact with gray wolves; somes wolves were domesticated and through many generations, the modern-day dogs emerged (Freedman 2014). A close distant cousin of the dogs and wolves are the golden jackals, canis aureus. Golden jackals were first reported in Croatia in 1491 (Fabbri 2013). The golden jackals are spread out from most of Europe, to northern Africa and parts of Asia (Arnold 2012). Despite its widespread distribution, there is little quantitative information on its densities or distribution (Arnold 2012). Assessing the actual distribution of golden jackals in order to study

For the past few hundred years, the golden jackals were largely regarded as an invasive pest and was subject to overhunting as well as other forms of eradication, such as poisonous baiting (Fabbri 2013). There are little known information on the golden jackal outside of Europe. Within Europe, it was likely that the region was colonized by small numbers of founders a few centuries ago, which carried a small portion of the total genetic diversity (Fabbri 2013). Furthermore, the expansion of golden jackals throughout Europe are not entirely clear; however, DNA analysis have shed some light on this

Freeman (2014) estimates that dogs and wolves diverged 14.9 thousand years ago. New data suggests that a divergence time of about 398 thousand years between the golden jackal and the population ancestral to dogs and wolves, which is a lot more recent than previously estimates (Freeman 2014). However, Interpretation of the phylogenetic signals in genomes was particularly challenging due to incomplete lineage sorting as well as post-divergence gene flow (Freedman 2014). Golden jackals may have less genetic variability in comparison to other canids; the analysis of the Austrian vagrant jackal indicates that it was genetically no different from ones in Serbian in both its mtDNA and microsatellites (Zachos 2009). This is significant because it contradicts previous assumptions that the golden jackals found in Italy, Slovenia, and Austria came from northwestern Croatia. Therefore, it is likely that immigration occurred from Serbia or Hungary since golden jackals across the northern Balkans display a high amount of genetic uniformity (Zachos