alt Hacker NewsI watch the genetic studies and it seems always presumed, in these articles, that dogs derive from wolves, not that dogs derive from siblings of wolves that derive from a common proto-canine ancestor.
The wikipedia entry considers the issue, presents data that are curious with respect ot the data in the Economist article, saying domestication is presumed from wolves roughly 14,000 years or so ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog#Taxonomy
The Economist article hints at the curiosity, in mentioning pre-Colombian dogs in the Americas were distinct some 23,000 years ago, but then returns to the standard presumptions.
An article in Nature also considers the ancestry presumptions
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We have fossil records of wolves that do not seem much different from modern grey wolves. We do not have fossil records of ancestors to the grey wolves that share much of their DNA coexisting with the grey wolves.
Occam's Razor says that the posited ancestor of Canus domesticus that shared grey wolf DNA was... the grey wolf.
The wiki article doesn't say domestication occurred roughly 14k years ago, it says at least 14k years ago, because that's the earliest definitive evidence of a domesticated dog. Here are the next two sentences from the wiki article:
"The remains of the Bonn–Oberkassel dog, buried alongside humans between 14,000 and 15,000 years ago, are the earliest to be conclusively identified as a domesticated dog.[9][7] Genetic studies show that dogs likely diverged from wolves between 27,000 and 40,000 years ago."