Dingoes - an origin story in the making
Fraser Island Dingo (Newretreads CC BY-SA 4.0)
One of the most charismatic of Australia's placental mammals is the dingo, and their presence on the continent has always retained an air of mystery in the scientific community. The earliest European colonists noted the relationship between these dogs and First Nations peoples, where it was recognized as a "domestic animal" (Tench, 1789).
Subsequent ethnographic and field records show a more complicated picture. Dingoes occurred in both wild and human-centered conditions, and could freely move between these two states, sometimes leaving to roam the countryside while their human companions were away. People treated dingoes as lapdogs and cuddle-buddies, relied on them to ward off enemies on the physical and spiritual planes, and valued them as companions during hunting and gathering work; as well traditional Aboriginal knowledge includes multiple references to dingoes (Shipman, 2021).
That said, when it comes to the question of origins - how the dingo got to Australia - more questions have been raised than answers.
To start with, let's look at the zooarchaeological record. The oldest remains of a dingo come from Madura Cave on the Nullarbor Plain in southwestern Australia, which have recently been re-dated to between 3,348-3,081 years ago (Balme, et al. 2018).
Human beings have been on the continent for far longer than this, with conflicting results from archaeology and ancient DNA studies hinting at potentially multiple expansions between 65,000 and ~40,000 years ago (Sümer, et al. 2024; Clarkson, etal. 2017). There is no evidence to suggest that the ancestors of First Nations Australians brought dogs with them to the continent, and the sheer lack of dingo remains between this period and the site at Madura Cave would imply then that these animals arrived at a far later date.
Turning now to genetics, evolutionary biologists have been able to shed far more light onto this matter.
Put it simply, most zoologists agree that the dingo belongs to the same species as the domestic dog, Canis lupus familiaris. The ancestors of our furry friends belong to a now-extinct population of gray wolves that seem to have inhabited central Eurasia and was domesticated by Ancient North Eurasians by 23,000 years ago (Perri, et al. 2021, Bergström, et al. 2020).
A paper by Matt A. Field and colleagues in 2022 demonstrated that most modern domestic dogs contain an increased number of copies of a gene called AMY2B, which creates copious amounts of the enzyme amylase in the pancreas to aid in the digestion of starches. It seems clear in this that the transition to agriculture across the world in the starting millennia of the Holocene Epoch was followed closely by domestic dogs. However, the dingo was found to lack this genetic change, indicating that its lineage branched off before the radiation of ancestral breeds by 11,000 years ago (Bergström, et al. 2020).
New Guinea Singing Dog (Patti McNeal, CC BY 2.0)
The closest living relative of the dingo is the New Guinea singing-dog which, like its Australian relative, exists along a spectrum of wild and domestic populations. These animals are near identical in appearance, and the most recent studies have revealed that their relationship is far more complex than being sister species: it appears that the dingo may be a subgroup of the New Guinea varieties, more closely related to the domestic forms than the wild ones (Surbakti, et al. 2020). These and similar findings also show evidence of admixture between New Guinea dogs and the separate later-diverging lineage of Oceanian dogs which accompanied the Austronesian-speaking Lapita peoples that populated Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands. This is reflected in one paper which found that the New Guinea singing dog samples derived 58% of their genome from ancient East Eurasian breeds (Bergström, et al. 2020). In contrast, it appears that dingoes have never interbred with other domestic dogs during their tenure in Australia as has long been believed (Weeks, et al. 2024).
So, it is clear that a source of answers to the origin of dingoes lay with their New Guinea cousins. At some point, a population was separated and settled in Australia without prior admixture from other dog lineages. When did this happen?
One comprehensive genetic study has suggested that the introduction of the dingo occurred further back in time than the earliest archaeological sites would suggest. Between 8,300 and 7,800 years ago - and at least on two occasions according to one proposed hypothesis - dingoes diverged from the New Guinea dogs and found their way onto Australia (Cairns & Wilton. 2016). Subsequent work on historic dingo remains adds support to this model, showing a gradient in dingo diversity that had already been established by 2,000 years ago (Souilmi, et al. 2024, Koungoulos, et al. 2024).
This creates somewhat of a disconnect between the genetic data and the archaeology, as no older dingo remains have been found beyond 3,300 years ago. In her 2021 book Our Oldest Companions, Pat Shipman drew two possible conclusions from this research: if these findings were valid, then dingoes simply did not interact with people when they first reached the continent until thousands of years later, or if these findings were not valid, it's because the proposed dates are over-estimates of mutation rates, which could have varied in their speed and so give the impression of phylogenetic antiquity.
It must also be considered that this early split from New Guinea dogs does not necessarily mean that introduction to Australia happened immediately afterward. For all we know, these new populations remained on the island for thousands of years before they were properly introduced. Shipman recounted the remarkable speeds at which dogs spread into new regions when introduced by people in historic times, and it's likely that it only took a few hundred years for dingoes to arrive and spread across the continent before 3,300 YA (Shipman, 2021).
These questions all tie into perhaps the biggest mystery in dingo origins: who brought them to Australia?
One immediate candidate would be the Austronesian-speaking peoples, who have a fairly clear archaeological record of moving through Southeast Asia and into New Guinea and onto the outer western Pacific islands. It would be a matter of picking up the ancestral dingoes and landing them on Australian shores. In his landmark 1994 book The Future Eaters, Tim Flannery felt it "personally... quite likely" that the Lapita people would have become rather familiar with northeast Australia, citing evidence as disparate as Maori oral traditions and the genetics of parasitic lice. He even credits them with introducing the dingo. There is some very recent evidence further adding support to an idea of contact and familiarity: comparisons of pottery shards on offshore Jiigurru island on the Great Barrier Reef point to contact between Lapita people and First Nations Australians around 2,950 and 1,815 years ago (Ulm, et al. 2024).
Another proposed candidate are the Toaleans of south Sulawesi. Evidence of their society ranges far beyond the Austronesians, having lived on the island for around 9,000 years. They share genetic ancestry with the Indigenous Peoples of Australia, New Guinea, and greater island Melanesia. The Toaleans were also sea-fairing people, and evidence of similar tool technologies between them and Borneo point to extensive marine trade networks (Fillios & Taçon, 2016).
At the moment, the issues with these and other candidates are a lack of evidence and an inconsistency with dates. We must recall there is a minimum date of 3,300 YA for the presence of dingoes in Australia, plus a few hundred years perhaps. While the Lapita were certainly present in and around New Guinea by that point, there is a lack of evidence to show that their presence near Australia extended beyond influencing coastal pottery use by the First Nations in the Great Barrier Reef. And besides, while they had domestic dogs, these belonged to a different lineage than the dingo (which shows no evidence of admixture with other dogs). Fillios & Taçon, 2016 argued strongly for the Toaleans as the right candidate, as they were a foraging society and so would have conceivably owned dogs that lacked the AMY2B gene copies seen in agricultural breeds. To date, however, there has been no evidence they had domestic dogs or that they reached Australia.
The last remaining evidence we can look at are First Nations oral traditions and history. As Pat Shipman recounts: "Traditional knowledge, expressed in dances (corroborees) and myths, ... asserts that dingoes were transported to Australia — accidentally or purposefully — by coastal boat-using peoples..." (Shipman, 2021).
Indigenous Australians retained memories of their first encounter with dingoes as animals with some familiarity to humans. Shipman has argued that the fluidity of these dogs between "wild" and "domestic" states is evidence that from the beginning the dingo and its New Guinea ancestors were behaviorally unique from all other dog breeds by having lived in a sort of intermediate-state: they were not as wild as gray wolves, nor were they as tamed and reared as hounds and terriers. That they seemed to stick around with people anyway and benefit reminds me somewhat of domestic cats, who have never been as fully-domesticated as most of our other pets and livestock.
Clearly, we know more about the origins of dingoes than we did a few decades ago, but there are still missing puzzle pieces. A currently undocumented people from Southeast Asia or the Western Pacific introduced dingoes (perhaps more than once) onto the Australian continent prior to 3,300 years ago, descended from dogs in New Guinea many thousands of years earlier (who, themselves, are descended from an ancient pre-agricultural lineage of dogs).
Given the recent advances in ancient DNA research and an increasing sample size of Southeast Asian sites prior to the spread of farming Austronesian-speaking peoples, I have little doubt that these gaps will be filled in the coming years. Pre-colonial Australia was clearly not as isolated from the rest of humanity as is typically portrayed in pop-history texts, even ignoring dingoes, but by finding out more about the curious origin of these sandy-colored companions and wanderers, we will continue to break that stereotype and further align Australia to the rest of the ancient world.
Book Citations:
Tim Flannery, The Future Eaters (Grove Press, 1994)
Pat Shipman, Our Oldest Companions (Harvard University Press, 2021)
Watkin Tench, A Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay (London, 1789)
Paper Citations:
Jane Balme, et al. 2018, New dates on dingo bones from Madura Cave provide oldest firm evidence for arrival of the species in Australia (Nature Scientific Reports)
Anders Bergström, et al. 2022, Grey wolf genomic history reveals duel ancestry of dogs (Nature)
Anders Bergström, et al. 2020, Origin and genetic legacy of prehistoric dogs (Science)
Chris Clarkson, et al. 2017, Human occupation of northern Australia by 65,000 years ago (Nature)
Matt A. Field, et al. 2022, The Australian dingo is an early offshoot of modern breed dogs (Science Advances)
Loukas G. Koungoulos, et al. 2024, Phenotypic diversity in early Australian dingoes revealed by traditional and 3D genomic morphometric analysis (Nature Scientific Reports)
Anna-Sapfo Malaspinas, et al. 2016, A genomic history of Aboriginal Australia (Nature)
Angela R. Perri, et al. 2021, Dog domestication and the duel dispersal of people and dogs in the Americas (PNAS)
Yassine Souilmi, et al. 2024, Ancient genomes reveal over two thousand years of dingo population structure (PNAS)
Arev P. Sümer, et al. 2024, Earliest modern human genomes constrain timing of Neanderthal admixture (Nature)
Suriani Surbakti, et al. 2020, New Guinea highland wild dogs are the original New Guinea singing dogs (PNAS)
Melanie A. Fillios & Paul S.C. Taçon. 2016, Who let the dogs in? A review of the recent genetic evidence for the introduction of the dingo to Australia and implications for the movement of people (Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports)
Sean Ulm, et al. 2024, Early Aboriginal pottery production and offshore island occupation on Jiijurru (Lizard Island group), Great Barrier Reef, Australia (Quaternary Science Reviews)
Andrew R. Weeks, et al. 2024, Genetic structure and common ancestry expose the dingo-dog hybrid myth (Evolution Letters)
Kylie M. Cairns & Alan N. Wilton, 2016, New insights on the history of canids in Oceania based on mitochondrial and nuclear data (Genetica)
