At some point between 9,000 and 34,000 years ago, dogs and wolves evolved from a common ancestor. That’s where their paths forever diverged, and it was long before humans developed agricultural societies, according to a study published in PLoS Genetics. Dogs are said to be more closely related to one another than wolves, regardless of geographic coincidence. This indicates that any genetic similarities are the result of interspecies breeding after the domestication of dogs, not a direct line of descent.

Though popular folklore suggests that domesticated dogs were born out of human domestication of docile, uncharacteristically friendly wolves, that’s likely not the case. Instead, early dogs likely found a home with hunter-gatherer societies, later adapting to agricultural life alongside humans.

“Dog domestication is more complex than we originally thought,” said John Novembre, associate professor in the Department of Human Genetics at the University of Chicago and a senior author on the study. “In this analysis we didn’t see clear evidence in favor of a multi-regional model, or a single origin from one of the living wolves that we sampled. It makes the field of dog domestication very intriguing going forward.”

In analyzing grey wolves from China, Croatia and Israel, the scientists produced what are believed to be the highest quality genome sequences to date for wolves. When compared to a basenji (a dog breed from central Africa), a dingo (from Australia) and a golden jackal (used to represent early divergence), the results indicated that all the dogs were more closely related to each other than the wolves from corresponding regions. This suggests that both dogs and wolves descended from one common wolf-like ancestor. This is not what researchers initially expected.

“One possibility is there may have been other wolf lineages that these dogs diverged from that then went extinct,” Novembre said. “So now when you ask which wolves are dogs most closely related to, it’s none of these three because these are wolves that diverged in the recent past. It’s something more ancient that isn’t well represented by today’s wolves.”

Keeping copious records of gene flow, or the transfer of alleles or genes from one population to another was an important factor in the accuracy of the analysis. As it turns out, gene flow was more prevalent than previously thought, which helps explain the study’s findings.

“If you don’t explicitly consider such exchanges, these admixture events get confounded with shared ancestry,” said Adam Freedman, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and the lead author on the study. “We also found evidence for genetic exchange between wolves and jackals. The picture emerging from our analyses is that these exchanges may play an important role in shaping the diversification of canid species.”

Recent studies suggest that amylase genes, which help break down starches, were crucial in dogs’ ability to live alongside humans in agricultural societies. In this study, though, the researchers found differences in the number of these genes across breeds of dogs and wolves, they were present to some degree in wolves. This means the genes aren’t exclusive to dogs and may have become more prevalent in dogs more recently, after they expanded.

Overall, the history of early dog domestication is murkier than ever before.

“We’re trying to get every thread of evidence we can to reconstruct the past,” Novembre said. “We use genetics to reconstruct the history of population sizes, relationships among populations and the gene flow that occurred. So now we have a much more detailed picture than existed before, and it’s a somewhat surprising picture.”