A new study is suggesting that today's dogs likely didn't evolve from gray wolves, according to a press release issued by The University of Chicago Medical Center.

Instead of evolving from the wolves found in the wild today, the study says gray wolves and dogs share a common ancestor in an extinct wolf lineage that lived thousands of years ago.

The team of researchers supposedly generated genome sequences from three different gray wolves, one from China, Croatia, and Israel, according to the study. The team then sequenced the genome of a basenji dog from central Africa, along with a dingo from Australia, according to the press release.

After completing their analysis, the researchers determined that modern dogs were not closely related to any of the three species.

"The dogs all form one group, and the wolves all form one group, and there's no wolf that these dogs are more closely related to of the three that we sampled," said researcher John Novembre, a professor of genetics at the University of Chicago, according to MNN.com. "That's the big surprise of the study."

Novembre suggested that there might have been other wolf lineages that modern dogs "diverged from" that are extinct now.

This theory changes the popular belief that domestic dogs come from "docile, friendly wolves" adopted by early farmers. Now it is believed that the earliest dogs likely started out as hunter/gatherers and evolved to the creatures we know today over time, said the study's lead author Dr. Adam Freedman, according to the press release.

"If you don't explicitly consider such exchanges, these admixture events get confounded with shared ancestry," said Freedman. Admixtures are hybrids produced due to interbreeding between two different population groups. "Dog domestication is more complex than we originally thought," said Dr. Novembre.

The study was published in the current issue of PLoS Genetics.

The study will help experts figure out what makes dogs act the way they do, and understand the evolution of canines more.

"We're trying to get every thread of evidence we can to reconstruct the past," Novembre said. "We use genetics to reconstruct the history of population sizes, relationships among populations and the gene flow that occurred. So now we have a much more detailed picture than existed before, and it's a somewhat surprising picture."

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