Illuminating the mysteries of wolf history

One of the most enduring surprises about the genetic history of Late Pleistocene populations is that continuity is often disturbed by upheaval. In fact, studies that support population continuity are increasingly rare in humans, a variety of vertebrate taxa, and vascular plants (Hofreiter & Stewart 2009; Burbrink et al. 2016). Perhaps such continuity should not be expected as the Pleistocene is marked by episodes of climate change, glaciation and the invasions of humans into previously isolated areas. Although fossils are one of the primary sources for inferring population continuity, a problem with fossil material is that, even if similar morphological forms might exist in a place over time, they may not be from the same genetic lineage. There are now readily available methods to assess genetic continuity solely from DNA found in fossil material, provided the record is fairly continuous. In a From the Cover article in this issue of Molecular Ecology, Loog et al. (2020) apply some of these readily available methods to analyse mitochondrial genomes and model the demography of wolves over the last 50,000 years.