[quote="yajnesh"][quote="Astibus"]I find it very hard to believe that the various "sub-breeds", which were kept to guard sheep and cattle, supposedly [u]descended[/u] from dogs that were mainly kept to guard households. Anthropologically, the proposed direction of influence doesn't make any sense. To me, it sounds just a little too "TM biased", being the "mother of all" those LGD's etc. [/quote] Well Dan I wont go into who descended from whom but they definitely seem to be related. I dont know why you find it so hard to believe. These dogs exist in the same geographical region with an exchange of men, animals and goods for centuries, probably millenia.[/quote] Yaj, maybe you misunderstood what I was trying to say. I do not have a hard time believing that the breeds of the region seem more or less interrelated. All I said was that considering the historic development of mankind itself, the first domesticated dogs were likely employed to work with livestock (or hunt) rather than to just guard the homestead. Declaring the TM as the source of all the aforementioned sub-breeds, rather than the product of these indigenous working dogs, seems very counterintuitive. That's all. :) Dan