American Scientist

Dingoes, the iconic “yellow dogs” of Australia, are deeply embedded in a great deal of folklore, literature, songs, poems, dances, and Indigenous art of the island continent. They figure prominently in traditional Aboriginal narratives, called Dreamtime, about the creation of the world and society. In Dreamtime narratives, dingoes are often equated with humans who have special supernatural powers and illustrate important moral principles. But despite their cultural importance, today the animals’ evolutionary identity remains obscure.

Many of the Dreamtime stories are tied to specific features of the landscape. In one called “Peopling of the Land,” recounted in an honors thesis by Merryl Parker, an old man named Ilbad is camping with his two children, a boy named Aidjumala and a girl named Maidjuminmag. After catching and eating a goanna, a type of lizard, they lie down to sleep, but the children are still hungry, so they crunch the goanna bones, awakening and annoying their father. He scolds them and throws a stick, breaking the girl’s arm, and she cries. He throws another stick, and the boy starts yelping like a dog. The two children run away together, and the old man cannot catch them to explain that he is sorry.

The children begin turning into dogs (probably dingoes in the original recounting). They stop for a while under a large banyan tree. They dig out a large, deep well. They roll about in the hole like dogs and decide to leave it there so that other people, including their father, may come and drink there too.

This story of Aidjumala and Maidjuminmag is part of a myth that continues as the pair experience various adventures. They are powerful deities, shaping the landscape, providing vital water holes, and tempering their anger at abuse with kindness. As they travel, they give rise to human beings, “breed them,” and put them in various places. They also give birth to puppies that become notable rocks at various billabongs (ponds or lakes).

The duality of dingoes resonates throughout the myth. Aidjumala and Maidjuminmag are human, but also dingoes. They are angry with their father, but also forgive him and leave water for him. Dingoes are fascinating because they exist on the boundary between wild and domesticated; they are both familiar and deeply mysterious.

If dingoes evolved from domestic dogs that had been brought to Australia from elsewhere, it is no surprise that they became feral once humans no longer controlled their breeding or survival. The very definition of domestication involves the genetic alteration of a species through human control over breeding and selection for specific traits, so without human management, any domestic animal would become more feral. But unlike feral domestic dogs or dingo–dog hybrids in Australia, dingoes survive perfectly well without humans.

If dingoes evolved from domestic dogs, then they would fall under special rules of naming. Some scholars have advocated calling domestic animals by the name of their wild ancestor (where known) and a subspecies name. For example, the domestic dog might be called Canis lupus familiaris: the wolf canid that is a human familiar. For simplicity, some would call it Canis familiaris.

Alternatively, if the canids that first arrived in Greater Australia had never been domesticated outside of Australia, then they could not have become domesticated while living with Aboriginal Australians, who did not manage their breeding during the 4,000 years that dingoes were isolated from other canids. These matters are currently being hotly debated in zoological circles.

Dingo Origin Stories

Some of the earliest historical written records of dingoes come from the first Europeans to arrive in Australia. Dingoes have been known to the Western world since at least 1623, when the Dutch explorer Jan Carstensz observed Aboriginal Wik people accompanied by what he took to be dogs as he viewed them from his ship, the Pera.

In 1699, the English explorer William Dampier landed briefly on the coast of western Australia and noted, “My men saw two or three beasts like hungry wolves, lean like so many skeletons, being nothing but skin and bones.” Dingoes today are likewise notable for the narrowness of their torsos—the cheekbones in their skulls are usually the widest part of their bodies—and those living in traditional Aboriginal settlements are often skinny. Dingoes might be fed scraps of food, scavenge leftovers, or hunt for themselves. Without question, most people from outside Australia first see a dingo and think, as I did, “That’s a dog.”

But is it?

Dingoes’ ancestors landed on Greater Australia some 4,000 years ago, according to the earliest dingo fossils. Among medium-large mammals in Australia, the dingo is the only placental mammal. Every indigenous Australian mammal of medium-large size was a marsupial and raised its young in a pouch. Dingoes, like humans, were invaders.

Any placental mammals—including humans, horses, camels, foxes, cats, and, yes, dogs and dingoes—got to Greater Australia by boat. Greater Australia was a supercontinent including New Guinea, mainland Australia, Tasmania, and assorted islands that attached these land masses to one another when sea levels were low, starting about 125,000 years ago. These land bridges have now been flooded, creating the Torres Strait between northern Australia and New Guinea about 12,000 years ago, and the Bass Strait between southern Australia and Tasmania about 8,000 years ago. The distance from any of the islands of Southeast Asia or Oceania to Greater Australia could only be traversed by making sea voyages, the longest of which was up to 100 kilometers: too far for humans or canids to swim. The shortest route by far would land humans in northern or northwestern Australia or perhaps on the Bird’s Head Peninsula of New Guinea. Archaeological sites in the islands of Southeast Asia and Oceania confirm that the ancient people living there were mariners, adept at exploiting coastal and even deep-sea resources. A sea voyage wouldn’t have been daunting. Although wooden or fiber boats don’t preserve well in the archaeological record, the remains of fishhooks, fish bones, crabs, mollusks, turtles, and occasional sea mammals have been found and tell a clear story.

People who keep dingoes as pets often describe them as escape artists, very intelligent but difficult to train.

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Anatomically modern humans—people with bodies like ours—arrived in Greater Australia between about 55,000 and 65,000 years ago, according to the dating of the oldest archaeological site, Madjedbebe, in Australia’s Northern Territory. That time frame was before modern humans got to Central and Eastern Europe or Asia after moving out of Africa, where they evolved. Greater Australia was the end point of the first major expansion of territory out of Africa in human history. Thus, future Australians must have gone their own way fairly soon after they and their kin wandered out of Africa about 70,000 years ago, in order to have traversed much of Southeast Asia and its islands, developed sophisticated maritime adaptations, and made it to Australia by 55,000 years ago. Of course, these early migrants didn’t know Australia was there or that they had left their home continent for new ones. In any case, those future Australians didn’t take any dogs with them, because they departed from other early populations long before the earliest dogs were domesticated.

Because ancestral dingoes were isolated on a continent with no other canids nearby, they adapted to their new and different environment both by learning and by physical or behavioral adaptations. Dingoes breed less frequently than domestic dogs, retaining a wolflike once-a-year reproductive schedule. They have unusually acute senses of smell and hearing even for a canid, which is useful in finding small game and underground water. In an arid continent with unpredictable rainfall, finding water and prey are key tasks. Dingoes are also adept climbers of trees, rocks, fences, and other structures, and they like high vantage points. With more flexibility in their shoulders and paws than dogs or wolves normally possess, dingoes are clever at opening latches, doors, and other devices intended to confine them.

The earliest known evidence of dingoes from Greater Australia comes from a burial site in Madura Cave on the Nullarbor Plain near the southern coast. Direct dating of the dingo bones with modern, state-of-the-art techniques yielded an age of between 3,348 and 3,081 years. Jane Balme, Sue O’Connor, and Stewart Fallon reanalyzed these remains in 2018 and suggested that this date was probably very close to the time of dingoes’ arrival on the continent, even though arrival must have occurred thousands of miles away. The team reasoned that the spread of dingoes from northern or northwest Greater Australia to the south happened rapidly, because introduced cats spread across most of Australia in 70 years, starting in about 1820, and true domestic dogs spread from one side of Tasmania to the other in about 25 years after colonials arrived at the turn of the 19th century.

One of the competing theories about dingoes’ zoological identity is that they were domestic dogs that migrated or were transported from Oceania or the islands of Southeast Asia into Greater Australia by humans, almost certainly mariners collecting seafood. Why take along a dingo or protodingo on a sea voyage to an unknown place? Perhaps simply for companionship—dingo puppies are extraordinarily appealing as pets—or because they would eat refuse and waste and keep the camp clean. They might also protect children and women from danger. Dingoes do not bark, they howl, and other dingoes howl in response, making an eerie chorus that travels a long way. Dingoes are also warm to sleep with at night and, in case of emergency, they could be eaten, although many Aboriginal groups regard the idea of eating dingoes as abhorrent. But dingoes are exceptionally difficult to train and have no innate desire to please humans, unlike dogs, so inevitably some would run off into the bush.

Another point is that there are hardly any dog or canid fossils in Oceania or the islands of Southeast Asia earlier than 4,000 years ago. Where did dingo ancestors come from? Somewhere in Southeast or Central Asia is probable, but unproven, based on genetic studies. Studies of partial genomes have shown that dingoes have only a few maternal (mitochondrial DNA) or paternal (Y chromosome) lineages, indicating a small founding population. However, the first studies to use complete genomes found 20 haplotypes, which clustered into two clades, indicating several possible introductions. Similar haplotypes are found among modern free-ranging Asian dogs. Everything is complicated by the alacrity with which domestic dogs interbreed with dingoes (and, for that matter, wolves, coyotes, jackals, and foxes on other continents). A combination of microsatellites can be used to estimate the degree of dingo and dog hybridization of any unknown individual, but there is no single trait that says “dingo” or “domestic dog” without ambiguity.

People who keep dingoes as pets often describe them as escape artists, very intelligent but difficult to train. Darren Griffiths and Leigh Mullan of the Western Australia Dingo Association together own five and describe the demands of living with a pack of dingoes as “like having five hyperactive kids running around the house.” Their dingoes cannot ever be left alone or they destroy, out of anxiety, furniture, doors, appliances, windows, and anything else they can reach. Changing anything in the house—even turning a ceiling fan on or off—causes the dingoes great distress. Either Griffiths or Mullan must constantly be with the animals, and, if they travel, they all go together in a specially outfitted van. Dingoes fare poorly when placed in kennels, and attempts to rehome them usually fail. Griffiths and Mullan echo remarks by Konrad Lorenz, the brilliant ethologist, who kept a dingo and wrote about it in his book Man Meets Dog. Although Lorenz recognized his dingo’s affection for him, “submission or obedience play no part in these feelings.”

What is particularly suggestive is that the oldest dingo specimen in Australia was found in a burial, and dingoes are the only animals that were regularly buried by Aboriginal Australians. Some of the dingo burials closely parallel the treatment of deceased humans in terms of the placement of the burial, paperbark wrapping around the intact body, and careful placement of rocks to prevent disturbance. As with humans, dingo bones in burials were sometimes ochred.

Archaeologists take the burial of dogs as one of the most telling signs that they had acquired a near-human status and were domesticated. By 12,000 to 14,000 years ago, long before dingoes reached Australia, dog burials and even special dog cemeteries could be found in many regions, including Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas. But—and here’s the big quandary—Indigenous Australians did not keep dingoes in a fashion that would permit domestication. Because they did not control dingo breeding, there was no chance of intentional selection by humans for desirable traits. Dingoes were special, but not domesticated.

Dingo Genetics

One issue that complicates zoologists’ work on this topic is that the original naming of dingoes was carried out in 1793 by German biologist Friedrich Meyer, who had never seen a dingo, but rather studied them using only sketches, paintings, and brief descriptions in sailors’ notes. The standards for formally naming a new species are now regulated by an august group, the International Commission for Zoological Nomenclature. Today, one of the many specific requirements for naming a new species is a detailed anatomical description and the designation of a type specimen, a preserved organism that forever carries the chosen name and theoretically typifies the species, to which any proposed member of the species can be compared. This standard was not required in 1793 and there is no type specimen for a dingo. So, historically, there is no way to know what a dingo is or was, even with genetic testing, because any genome would have to be compared to a dingo that could possibly represent a hybrid. This problem is only exaggerated by the issue of domestication. Archaeologist Melanie Fillios of the University of New England has recently won a grant to collect morphological and genetic information from the oldest precontact dingo specimens known, which may clarify the issue of what dingoes were like before Europeans and their dogs arrived.

Dingoes will initiate eye contact with humans more often than wolves, but do not appeal to humans for help as quickly as dogs will.

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The genetics of domesticated dogs is complicated by breeders’ selections, which produce traits that might not evolve otherwise. If not bred to breed standards, after a few generations a Pekingnese’s very shortened face might lengthen, and its big eyes and long, fluffy fur might change. In the same way, an elongated, sleek Afghan Hound with a deep chest might turn out stockier offspring without selective breeding. But these are the very characteristics that fanciers of these breeds admire. Breeds have been developed primarily in the past 200 years in Europe. We only see a sort of generic dog—what I sometimes call a “default dog”—in free-breeding animals that are an admixture of various breeds and sometimes a local, wild dog. These are often characterized as “village dogs” or “pariah dogs,” the sort of scruffy mongrel that can be found many places in the world. Although village dogs can look more or less like anything, they are dependent upon humans for food and they rarely look like the extremes of intentionally bred dogs: no very tiny dogs, no hulking lurchers, no stock-obsessed sheep dogs, no woolly poodles.

What is particularly fascinating is that some Asian village dogs look a lot like dingoes, which some people see as a clue to the ancestry of dingoes. More than any other canids I know, New Guinea Singing Dogs and the New Guinea Highland Wild Dogs discovered in 2016 tend to look like dingoes. When the latter have been genotyped, we will know a bit more. New Guinea Singing Dogs are very rare and inbred, being largely the offspring of eight individuals captured in the 1850s. They share the dingo’s howl and some personality traits, such as resistance to training and confinement. Both could be derived from village dogs that no longer live with people and, because of their small populations and inbreeding, might have become genetically distinct.

Dingoes seem to have traditionally operated in a unique space that is close to humans, but not quite domestic or wild. Before and in the early days of European colonization, dingoes often lived at least part of their lives in traditional Aboriginal settlements. Commonly, early ethnographies reported that tribal Australians stole dingo pups out of their dens and raised them as favored pets in their settlements, with women sometimes carrying them around their waists like a furry belt if the daily trek was too arduous or rough for small dingoes’ feet. Women also sometimes breastfed dingo pups, defleaed them, kissed them, fed and fussed over them, and slept with them for warmth. When they got big enough to begin to be troublesome—stealing too much food, destroying objects, or simply being too rambunctious—dingoes were often driven out of camp to go find their own territories and start new families. According to some accounts, Aboriginal women and children nearly always took dingoes with them when they went out to hunt small game or collect food. Dingoes were regarded as protection against evil spirits, wild animals, or hostile strangers; they helped people find small game faster, too. Whether dingoes were useful to men hunting kangaroos is much debated. In Dreamtime stories, a dingo could be a canid or a person, alternately or sometimes simultaneously.

A fascinating genetic discovery published in 2013 is that dingoes, like most wolves, carry only two copies of the AMY2B gene, which improves the efficiency of starch digestion. Nearly all dogs carry more than two copies of this gene, hinting that they were domesticated after agriculture was started and more starchy foods were available. No prehistoric canid older than 7,000 years has been found with the AMY1B gene for starch-digesting salivary enzymes. A few domestic dogs such as Siberian huskies, who historically lived with people who did not practice much agriculture, did not acquire multiple copies of this gene. Among agricultural people, a parallel mutation for multiple copies of the gene for human salivary enzymes, AMY1B, has been found, whereas preagricultural people such as hunter-gatherers, Neanderthals, or Denisovans have few copies.

Were dingoes ever domesticated? In genetic and behavioral traits, dingoes often fall between wolves and dogs. Whole genome studies consistently place dingoes between wolves and wolflike breeds of dogs (see the figure above). In terms of less tangible traits, the same is true. Behavioral tests carried out by Ádám Miklósi’s well-respected Dog Research Project in Budapest have highlighted the differences between wild canids and domesticated dogs in terms of their relationships with humans. Compared to wolves, dogs are exceptionally adept at interpreting intentions from human gestures such as pointing or changing the direction of their gaze. Faced with an insoluble problem, dogs will look to humans for assistance. Wolves raised identically by humans will not. Dingoes will initiate eye contact with humans more often than wolves and for longer stretches of time, but do not appeal to humans for help as quickly or as thoroughly as dogs. Even if hand-raised, wolves may be attached to their human family, but they are far less eager to make contact with unfamiliar humans than dogs are.

Bridgett vonHoldt of Princeton University has been investigating mutations in dog genomes that affect some of the same genes that are implicated in Williams-Beuren syndrome (WBS) in humans. Twenty-seven genes are missing or silenced in people with WBS. People with the condition are typically hypersocial and gregarious, with distinctive facial features some have described as “elfin,” but also have cardiovascular problems, short stature, and cognitive defects. According to vonHoldt’s studies, in dogs the action of three of these specific genes is blocked by insertions that prevent the genes from functioning normally, whereas wolves have functional genes in this region. This difference may have caused dogs to lose their fear of and aggressive reactions to humans and may have increased the animals’ friendliness, thus facilitating domestication. As far as I know, no one has investigated these genes in dingoes yet, but I would guess that they may not have all three blocked genes but perhaps only one or two. This genetic difference might account for dingoes’ intermediate tolerance for humans compared to wolves and domestic dogs, even though they still react fearfully to changes in their “pack” or habitat.

Charles Darwin, who visited Australia early in 1836, saw the ambiguity in dingoes. He wrote in 1868, “In Australia the dingo is both domesticated and wild.” Other prominent thinkers on domestication have proclaimed that domestication is a process. Perhaps what dingoes show us is a stage in that process.