Animals as Domesticates: A World View through History by Juliet Clutton-Brock

Author:Juliet Clutton-Brock [Clutton-Brock, Juliet]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Chicago Distribution
Published: 2011-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

During the twentieth century many biologists and archaeozoologists studied the skeletal anatomy of the dingo in attempts to discover its origins and relationships with other primitive breeds of dog. All that could be determined was that the dingo was morphologically similar to these other breeds, which, for the dogs in Thailand, L. K. Corbett named “Thai dingoes.”7 With the advance of molecular biology, however, it has now been possible to elucidate the genetic relationships of these dogs and thereby their most probable origins. This has been carried out by Peter Savolainen, who analyzed 211 Australian dingoes as well as a large sample of dogs and wolves from worldwide sources and nineteen pre-European archaeological dog samples from Polynesia. Savolainen and colleagues found that a majority of the dingoes had mtDNA type A29, which was only found in dogs from East Asia and Arctic America, whereas eighteen of the nineteen other types of mtDNA were unique to dingoes. The mean genetic distance to A29 among the dingo mtDNA sequences indicated an origin 5,000 years ago. From these results it was deduced that dingoes have an origin from domesticated dogs coming from East Asia. They were introduced from a small number of dogs, possibly at a single occasion, and have since lived isolated from other dog populations.8 This result is, of course, not unexpected and supports the assumptions from all the countless measurements that have been taken of dingo, wolf, and dog skulls over the past fifty years.

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