Our Oldest Companions by Pat Shipman

Author:Pat Shipman
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Harvard University Press

TWELVE

The Importance of Dingoes

BECAUSE CANIDS were the first animals to be domesticated, and animal domestication transformed human life, tracing the location, timing, and function of canid domestication is important. As far as we know, dingoes were only the second large placental mammal (after humans) to reach Australia. Like humans, dingoes came to Australia by boat, a fact that implies to some analysts that dingoes were at least semidomesticated when they reached Greater Australia. However, many undomesticated animals have also been transported by boat, such as foxes, giraffes, moose, various cervids, lions, and cheetahs, to name a few. Traditional knowledge, expressed in dances (corroborees) and myths, also asserts that dingoes were transported to Australia—accidentally or purposefully—by coastal boat-using peoples, even if dingoes were not fully domesticated at the time.

Semidomestication is an ill-defined term. True domestication involves human influence over the breeding and survival of the young; people thus exert a selective force over the genetics of the species. Semidomesticated dogs are often called village dogs, which are both free ranging and free breeding. So-called village dogs live primarily by scavenging in human-managed environments. They are more tolerant of humans than truly wild or feral dogs and may have socially recognized owners and names. Though village dogs depend on human food and scavenged remains, and could be considered commensals of humans, humans do not control village dogs’ breeding choices. Such dogs are often admixed with various recognized breeds—even in Asia these are often European breeds—and may be native to a particular geographic area, forming groups similar to landraces of plants. But there is little evidence of selective breeding in Asian village dogs. Genomic studies of village dogs document considerable genetic diversity, which has led some researchers to suggest that they are close to the original type of canid that was domesticated. If semidomesticated village dogs were the direct ancestors of dingoes, then dingoes cannot reasonably be understood as a fully domestic species gone feral after arrival in Sahul. It is tempting to explain the origin of dingoes by invoking the long-standing practice of people coming by boat from Makassar in Sulawesi to the Kimberly (northwestern Australia), and later to Arnhem Land, to collect trepangs (sea cucumbers), an idea favored by Melanie Fillios and Paul Taçon. Traditionally, a group of men would sail to the northwest coast of Australia, set up a temporary village for a few weeks or months, and collect, then dry and smoke, trepangs to take home and sell to Chinese traders as a prized ingredient in food or medicine.1

Trepang collectors are known to have started coming to Australia in the 1500s, but they could have come far earlier, bringing village dogs with them. Peter Savolainen and his team documented genetic resemblances between sections of the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) of dingoes and of Southeast Asian village dogs. They concluded that the Australian dingo probably originated from a few East Asian domestic or village dogs because they detected only a single mtDNA haplotype in the dingoes in this study, and it matched a dog haplotype that is common throughout East Asia.

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