The archaeological and paleontological records show the grey wolf's continuous presence for at least the last 300,000 years. This continuous presence contrasts with genomic analyses, which suggest that all modern wolves and dogs descend from a common ancestral wolf population that existed as recently as 20,000 years ago. These analyses indicate a population bottleneck, followed by a rapid radiation from an ancestral population at a time during, or just after, the Last Glacial Maximum. This implies that the original wolf populations were out-competed by a new type of wolf which replaced them. However, the geographic origin of this radiation is not known.
