It is well known that dogs descended from wolves; that packs of wolves would follow communities of hunter/gathers and take food scraps from their camps in preference to hunting prey. Gradually the bravest wolves got closer and closer to the humans and so got most of the food, gradually leading to an evolutionary advantage as each generation of wolves became tamer. It is believed that wolves befriended humans, becoming domesticated, about 15,000 years ago. New research at Cornell University in New York shows that dogs were first domesticated in Central Asia in the region of Mongolia. Thousands of DNA samples taken from dogs around the world were compared with each other in order to build up a picture of their evolutionary origins. The results point to Mongolia being the place where dogs first transitioned from wolves.