London, Sep 2 - Eastern Asia is believed to be the place where man tamed the wolf into becoming a dog. Now, researchers have succeeded in further narrowing the birthplace of man's best friend.

'For the first time in history, it is now possible to provide a detailed picture of the dog, including birthplace, point in time and the number of wolves that were tamed,' says Peter Savolainen, a biology researcher at the Kungliga Tekniska Hogskolan (KTH) or The Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden.

Savolainen and his Swedish colleagues have made a number of new discoveries concerning canine history. The research result comes from genetical analysis of mitochondrial DNA from 1,500 dogs from all over the world.

These discoveries establish that the dog arrived 16,000 years ago in Asia, south of the Yangtze River in China. This is considerably earlier as concerns time and place than had previously been established.

'Our previous discoveries from 2002 have not been fully accepted.