Is the Dingo Born to be Wild?

This article is part of our special Pets section, in which we discuss scientists’ growing interest in our animal companions.

Dingoes are muscular, graceful canines with pricked ears, bushy tails, and teeth so pointed they look as if they’ve been put through a pencil sharpener. Instead of barking or howling, they emit a long, melancholy howl. They are wild in Australia, but not truly native, having been brought to the continent at least 3,300 years ago, probably by Asian seafarers. By that time, Aboriginal people had already been living there for about 60,000 years.

Were dingoes domesticated or wild when they arrived in Australia? Were they descendants of domestic animals that went feral on a new continent, or wolves that were on their way to becoming dogs and never made it? A clear consensus has long eluded the scientific community.

“The fundamental question is what clues about the wild or domesticated nature of early dingoes are in the archaeological record,” said Pat Shipman, professor emeritus of anthropology at Penn State University.

That record is the basis of one paper published in October in the journal PLOS One, which suggested that dingoes were familiar companions of Australian people long before the first dedicated European settlement in 1788.

Researchers examined the largely unstudied remains of no fewer than seven dingoes excavated between 1962 and 1966 at the Curracurrang Rock Shelter, just south of Sydney. Dating of the bones showed that the animals were buried among and sometimes next to people as early as 2,000 years ago. At another site in South Australia, researchers noticed dingoes buried at the edge of human burial grounds, perhaps functioning as a barrier or protective ring, a scientist later suggested.

“At all the tribal sites where burials are recorded, the process and methods of disposal are identical or nearly identical to those associated with human rituals in the same area,” says Loukas Koungoulos, an archaeologist at the Australian National University and lead author of the dingo burial study. He and his colleagues found records of dingo “burials” from the 19th and 20th centuries that included variations on the Buddhist practice of “sky burials.”

In this tradition, the body was placed on a raised wooden platform, covered with leaves and branches, and left to decompose for several months, in the same way that Aboriginal people disposed of their own dead. The bones were then buried a second time in a hollow log, which was either placed back in a tree or wrapped in thin bark and placed deep in crevices or clefts, or on hard-to-reach ledges in rock formations.

Dr. Shipman, who was not involved in the research into the dingo remains, said hominid burial rituals were indicative of an intimate, if not symbiotic, relationship between humans and animals. “By revisiting every known site of dingo burials and reviewing the original field notes, this team has significantly clarified the issues,” she said. “It is abundantly clear that dingoes lived and gave birth to young in human encampments and were regarded as valued near-humans.”

Dr. Koungoulos defines domestication in dogs in terms of how they behave around people. “If you have a canine that lives willingly with humans, without restrictions on its mobility, for the duration of its life, and reproduces in the company of humans, then it is domesticated – regardless of whether it looks different from wild relatives or not.”

Scientists have long known that, until colonisation disrupted the Aboriginal way of life, it was common practice to snatch dingo cubs from their mothers’ dens and raise them in human settlements. Dr Koungoulos argues that this bespoke domestication is much more likely because the cubs would not learn the behaviours and social cues essential for living and breeding within social dingo groups. Dr Shipman added: “The discovery of several largely complete skeletons of very young dingoes at Curracurrang is testament to the longevity of this tradition.”

There is also proof that dingoes, once in Australia, brought about a series of cultural and ecological developments that transformed Aboriginal society. “Using dingoes for hunting is often a much more efficient and effective way of obtaining meat,” Dr Koungoulos said. “Particularly for women, who used them with great success to obtain small animals such as goannas and rats. But also for men, who used them on organised drives for larger animals such as kangaroos and wallabies.”

To Indigenous Australians, dingoes were camp keepers, believed to be able to discern malevolent spirits that could not be detected by humans. Accounts from early European settlers describe Aboriginal hunters in the outback huddled with their dingoes for warmth; to Indigenous Australians, a night with two dogs was a cold night, a night with three dogs even colder.

As affectionate as dingoes often are towards people, they lack the undying loyalty of most dogs. Modern Australians who keep them as pets require everything from leashes to high walls. Without restrictions, dingoes inevitably return to the bush to find mates, seemingly never to return. “In the wild they will quickly lose all signs of domestication,” said Dr. Koungoulos.

At Curracurrang, the researchers found examples of well-healed injuries and signs of illness at the burials of older dingoes, indicating that people had cared for their tame dingoes when the animals suffered some debilitation. Dr. Koungoulos said new research from teeth and diet shows mounting evidence – measured by carbon and nitrogen isotopes in tooth enamel – that those dingoes probably ate many of the same foods as humans.

“Whether that means the dingoes were being fed directly or whether they were scavenging for discarded bits of human food is hard to say,” he said. Historical sources suggest it would have been a combination of both; dingoes, for example, were often deliberately fed the entrails and bones or other less desirable parts of a kangaroo kill.

The oldest dingo at Curracurrang in terms of physical age had canine teeth that were carried towards the throat; in 21st century veterinary medicine the condition is seen in dogs that spend a lot of time biting cylindrical objects. At the rock shelter these would have been the large long bones of animals such as wallabies or wombats, which was common to the people who lived there.

Dr. Koungoulos said the wear on the molars was the result of routinely eating hard or abrasive foods. “This condition is never seen in wild dingoes,” he said. “They normally eat meat that has been processed by the canines and premolars.” Only under intense pressure on resources – drought, large numbers of competitors and other factors – do wild dingoes consume significant amounts of bone.

Is a dingo a wolf that has undergone a human-related evolutionary change? Although Dr. Koungoulos is undecided, he leans toward the theory that dingoes are descendants of dogs that reverted to a wolf-like state over time while living in the wild. He wonders whether the first dingoes were similar to modern-day Asian village dogs – largely independent of humans in everyday life, but indirectly dependent on them for food-gathering opportunities.

Genetic studies have shown that dingoes share a common, though now extinct, ancestor with singing dogs from New Guinea, whose melodious, yodel-like vocalizations sound like a cross between a wolf cry and a whale song. Although the rare New Guinea lineage has been called a “living fossil” by some conservationists because it is thought to resemble the dogs that lived 10,000 years ago, Dr. Koungoulos: “The truth is that we don’t know what a hypothetical ‘dog’ ancestor of dingoes would have looked like or how it would have behaved.”

So far, no Stone Age dingo has been found buried with slippers in its mouth, or for that matter with chewed up homework.