"Through this study, we were able to see that communication between animals can be learnt and that the behaviour of gazing at humans to access food is not related to domestication.
While the japonica rice, after nearly 10,000 years of domestication and selection, can tolerate cold weather and has been expanded to northern China and the temperate zones in Northeast Asia.
"Such an age for the beginnings of rice cultivation and domestication would agree with the parallel beginnings of agriculture in other regions of the world during a period of profound environmental change when the Pleistocene was transitioning into the Holocene," Lu Houyuan, professor of the Institute of Geology and Geophysics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, who led the study, said.
"Analyses of Chinese indigenous dogs therefore allow us to stratify the domestication process in dogs, and investigate the role of positive selection that occurred specifically during the first stage of domestication," said the report.
" In their paper, published in the journal Current Biology, the scientists wrote: 'The striking correspondence between dogs' and humans' hemispheric biases reported here may reflect convergent evolution if dogs have been selected to respond to human vocal signals during domestication.
"How is it that dogs are so adapted to humans, and what's happened during the process of domestication?
Both species have a long history of domestication in China and have appeared on oracle bone scripts and other artifacts since prehistoric times, according to Huang, who in 2012 challenged the saying that Chinese are "descendants of the dragon" by arguing that the earliest Chinese actually worshipped the meek ruminants.
