Where are Dalmatians from?

The question of what breeds are behind Dalmatians (and what breeds Dalmatians have contributed to) comes up regularly in idle ringside discussion. Dalmatians are known as the only truly spotted breed, part of why coat colour/markings are given so much weight in the standard. But where did they come from?

Interestingly, Dalmatians are one of three breeds to do not associate with any other breed group at the genome level. 

When thousands of genomes are put together and run through similarity analyses, dogs of the same breed will cluster together. Then those breeds will group with other very genetically similar breeds. For example, all of the retrievers group together. All of the British terriers group together. All of the poodle-like dogs group together. 

There are three breeds that do not associated with other groups of breeds; dachshunds, basenjis, and our beloved Dalmatians. Dachshunds tend to be loosely associated with the scent-hound group (which makes sense based on their steller noses and desire to follow trails). Basenjis float around on their own but somewhat near the Asian breeds. The suspicion is that Basenjis don’t really cluster with other breeds mainly because we do not yet have appropriate representation of the different dog populations in Africa. 

What about those lonely Dalmatians? They do not have a strong claim to any group!

Every breed in the dog genome was compared through genomic haplotypes (chunks of the genome inherited together). Breeds are then charted by the amount of haplotypes that are shared between the main breed and each other breed. There is no significant haplotype sharing with any breed and the Dalmatian! These genetic events can be dated back to approximately 150 to 200 years. It is possible that whatever the Dalmatian was 200 years ago mixed with other breeds, but in the past 150-200 years there has be no significant mixing of the Dalmatian with anything or anything with the Dalmatian!

As Dalmatian owners, we always knew our beloved spotty pals were unique - now we have a science to prove it :).