Grey wolves (Canis lupus) are one of the few large terrestrial carnivores that maintained a
wide geographic distribution across the Northern Hemisphere throughout the Pleistocene
and Holocene. Recent genetic studies have suggested that, despite this continuous
presence, major demographic changes occurred in wolf populations between the late
Pleistocene and early Holocene, and that extant wolves trace their ancestry to a single late
Pleistocene population. Both the geographic origin of this ancestral population and how it …