Sheep retroviruses can be used to map the selective preferences of early farmers and trace livestock movements across Europe.

Summary: The aim of this note is to describe the program endog (v.3.0). The program handles pedigree information to conduct several demographic and genetic analyses including: (a) the individual inbreeding and average relatedness coefficients; (b) effective population size; (c) parameters characterizing the concentration of both gene and individuals origin such as the effective number of founders and ancestors, the effective number of founder herds; (d) F statistics and paired genetic distances for each subpopulation under study; (e) descriptors of the genetic importance of the herds in a population and (f) generation intervals. The program will help breeders and researchers to monitor the changes in genetic variability and population structure with limited costs of preparing datasets. The program, user's guide and example file can be downloaded free of charge from the World Wide Web at http://www.ucm.es/info/prodanim/Endog30.zip.

Cattle domestication from wild aurochsen was among the most important innovations during the Neolithic agricultural revolution. The available genetic and archaeological evidence points to at least two major sites of domestication in India and in the Near East, where zebu and the taurine breeds would have emerged independently. Under this hypothesis, all present-day European breeds would be descended from cattle domesticated in the Near East and subsequently spread during the diffusion of herding and farming lifestyles. We present here previously undescribed genetic evidence in contrast with this view, based on mtDNA sequences from five Italian aurochsen dated between 7,000 and 17,000 years B.P. and >1,000 modern cattle from 51 breeds. Our data are compatible with local domestication events in Europe and support at least some levels of introgression from the aurochs in Italy. The distribution of genetic variation in modern cattle suggest also that different south European breeds were affected by introductions from northern Africa. If so, the European cattle may represent a more variable and valuable genetic resource than previously realized, and previous simple hypotheses regarding the domestication process and the diffusion of selected breeds should be revised.

Animal domestication was a major step forward in human prehistory, contributing to the emergence of more complex societies. At the time of the Neolithic transition, zebu cattle (Bos indicus) were probably the most abundant and important domestic livestock species in Southern Asia. Although archaeological evidence points toward the domestication of zebu cattle within the Indian subcontinent, the exact geographic origins and phylogenetic history of zebu cattle remains uncertain. Here, we report evidence from 844 zebu mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) sequences surveyed from 19 Asiatic countries comprising 8 regional groups, which identify 2 distinct mitochondrial haplogroups, termed I1 and I2. The marked increase in nucleotide diversity (P < 0.001) for both the I1 and I2 haplogroups within the northern part of the Indian subcontinent is consistent with an origin for all domestic zebu in this area. For haplogroup I1, genetic diversity was highest within the Indus Valley among the three hypothesized domestication centers (Indus Valley, Ganges, and South India). These data support the Indus Valley as the most likely center of origin for the I1 haplogroup and a primary center of zebu domestication. However, for the I2 haplogroup, a complex pattern of diversity is detected, preventing the unambiguous pinpointing of the exact place of origin for this zebu maternal lineage. Our findings are discussed with respect to the archaeological record for zebu domestication within the Indian subcontinent.

Summary: Computation of inbreeding rate (ΔF) must consider that inbreeding is delayed with one generation with respect to the idealized population when addressed using individual inbreeding coefficients. The expression relating inbreeding in generation t with inbreeding rate F_t = 1 – (1–ΔF)^t should be more correctly written in real animal populations as F_t = 1 – (1–ΔF)^t−1, as changes in allele frequencies occur in the equivalent co‐ancestries in the previous generation. This simple approach is tested on simulated and real pedigrees thus demonstrating that: (i) the adjusted individual increase in inbreeding becomes stable in populations under random mating while the unadjusted parameter does not; (ii) regression of the unadjusted parameter over generations in pedigrees under random mating is highly significant while after correction it is not significant; and (iii) the variance of the adjusted parameter is reduced with the generations.

Recently different studies have formalized the way in which it is possible to obtain coancestry coefficients from molecular information (Caballero and Toro 2002; Eding and Meuwissen 2001) by applying Malécot's (1948) definition of kinship to marker genes, though referring it to identity-by-state instead of identity-by-descent (Caballero and Toro 2002). The molecular coancestry between two individuals, i and j, is the probability that two randomly sampled alleles from the same locus in two individuals are identical by state. Because of its straightforward relationship with genealogical coancestry, this parameter has been shown to have interesting properties that may be used for conservation purposes (Eding et al. 2002; Toro et al., 2002; 2003). Moreover, molecular coancestry can be used to assess genetic diversity within and between populations (Eding and Meuwissen 2001). Using simulated data, Eding and Meuwissen (2001) showed that molecular coancestry has some interesting properties, namely that average kinship between populations becomes constant very quickly after population fission, causing between-population diversity to remain constant. This property allows researchers using molecular coancestry information to study the genetic relationships between populations (Álvarez et al. 2005; Caballero and Toro 2002; Fabuel et al. 2004).